A surrealist painting from the 1940s by Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) - shattering the auction record for an artwork by a female artist. The painting went for more than 1,000 times its original auction price in 1980, after a tense bidding battle between two collectors, according to the Sotheby's auction house. The auction also broke the previous record for the highest amount paid for a Kahlo portrait, which sold for $34.9 million in 2021. The work - titled El sueño (la cama), which is translated to The dream (The bed) - depicts Kahlo asleep in a canopy bed beneath a skeleton entwined with dynamite. It marks one of the Mexican artist's most psychologically charged self portraits, Sotheby's said, and was painted during a turbulent chapter in Kahlo's life - the year her former lover was assassinated and shortly after her divorce and remarriage.

After 35 years, the secretive CIA sculpture finally gave up its mystery, thanks to a novelist, a playwright, and some misplaced documents. But the chase to decode continues. Jim Sanborn couldn't believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers kept on paying him a $50 fee to offer their guesses to the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4--wrong without exception.

If you grew up obsessed with gaming, them you were probably told by various relatives that you could never make a living playing video games all day. Yet while that might once have been true, there is now a growing industry of professional gamers for hire making serious money with their hard-earned skills. Marko Uslinkovski is a 36-year-old professional gamer from North Macedonia who makes a living beating games for people who don't have time to do it themselves. With a team of 50 'boosters' Marko told MailOnline his company, Captain Carry, can turnover between 30,000 to 50,000 in a good month. Marko told MailOnline: 'These new games are extremely difficult, so we're like the last ditch effort for people that are borderline giving up.' Marko Uslinkovski (pictured) is a 36-year-old professional gamer from North Macedonia who makes a living beating games for people who don't have time to do it themselves If you grew up obsessed with gaming, then you were probably told by various relatives that you'd never make a living playing video games all day (stock image) Like so many who end up with a life-long passion for video games, Marko was hooked from his very first taste.

A four-dollar check that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wrote to Radio Shack in 1976 was up for auction on Wednesday at Boston-based RR Auction with a bid of more than $33,000 with five hours left to go. The signed check, drawn against an "Apple Computer Company" account at a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Los Altos, California, joins a hot market for Jobs' signature and memorabilia. Last year, a $9.18 Apple Computer cheque signed by Jobs in 1976 sold for $55,000; another from the same year, for $13.86 to Elmar Electronics, sold in March for $37,564. The Apple inventor's signature on a job application for employment as an "electronics tech or design engineer" from 1973, classified as Jobs' earliest known signature by the auctioneer, sold in 2018 for $174,757. A signature from three years later, when Jobs was 21, that appeared on an original Apple founding contract signed by Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne was sold by Sotheby's in December 2011 for $1,594,500.

A collection of extremely rare Magic: The Gathering cards are expected to fetch as much as $180,000 when they are auctioned off on Friday, April 21. Included among the cards that are going up for auction is a complete 310-card set of "Legends," the third expansion pack sold by Magic: The Gathering, which was released in June 1994. The auction will also feature a factory-sealed unlimited starter deck, which is expected to sell for at least £10,000-12,000, or about $15,000 U.S. dollars. A starter deck is a random collection of 60 cards from a set. Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game produced by Wizards of the Coast.

Single-shot auctions are commonly used as a means to sell goods, for example when selling ad space or allocating radio frequencies, however devising mechanisms for auctions with multiple bidders and multiple items can be complicated. It has been shown that neural networks can be used to approximate optimal mechanisms while satisfying the constraints that an auction be strategyproof and individually rational. We show that despite such auctions maximizing revenue, they do so at the cost of revealing private bidder information. While randomness is often used to build in privacy, in this context it comes with complications if done without care. Specifically, it can violate rationality and feasibility constraints, fundamentally change the incentive structure of the mechanism, and/or harm top-level metrics such as revenue and social welfare. We propose a method that employs stochasticity to improve privacy while meeting the requirements for auction mechanisms with only a modest sacrifice in revenue. We analyze the cost to the auction house that comes with introducing varying degrees of privacy in common auction settings. Our results show that despite current neural auctions' ability to approximate optimal mechanisms, the resulting vulnerability that comes with relying on neural networks must be accounted for.

'Apple Computer A', the prototype for the tech giant's first ever computer, is up for sale – and could sell for more than half a million dollars at auction. Considered'lost' until recently, the prototype was hand-soldered by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1976, the year the company was established. The'rare' and'historic' item is essentially a circuit board covered in chips and wires, embossed with the words'Apple Computer A 76'. It was a prototype for the Apple-1, the firm's first ever product, which was sold as an assembled circuit board and lacked basic features such as a keyboard or monitor. The prototype is now being sold off by RR Auction, an auction house based in Boston.

Incheon, South Korea – Kim, 35, did not explicitly object when his wife started investing in art three years ago – but he had his reservations. "I told her that I'm fine as long as you want it," the video game designer, who asked to be identified by his last name only, told Al Jazeera. "But I was secretly thinking, why not just invest that money into stocks or something?" But as time passed, Kim began to appreciate how art could offer an escape from the COVID-19 pandemic and the monotony of work. Last year, he joined her in collecting fine art.

This is similar in spirit to the infamous "auction house" that launched with "Diablo 3," a feature that generated so much outrage and blowback that Activision Blizzard had to retool the entire game to remove the feature. But gaming companies will often try and try again to get consumers to play along. Instead of an auction house, we have a marketplace where players can sell gems to each other for "platinum," an in-game currency that can be earned through play or purchased outright by spending "eternal orbs," currency bought by real-world cash. If any of these explanations sound convoluted to you as a reader, it's all by design. Many free-to-play games obfuscate their gambling or monetization mechanics to hide that the game's systems are designed to push player spending.

A piece of computer history and coveted collector's item with ties to Southern California fetched six figures at auction this week. An Apple-1 computer, hand-built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the 1970s, sold for $500,000 at auction Tuesday in Monrovia. The final bid for the unit was $400,000, with the buyer -- who wishes to remain anonymous -- paying an additional $100,000 premium, or commission, to John Moran Auctioneers. The Southern California-based auction house estimated that the unit, dubbed the "Chaffey College Apple-1" after its original owner was identified as a Chaffey professor, would sell for between $400,000 to $600,000. In 2014, Bonhams auction house sold an Apple-1 for more than $900,000.