champion
Who will win the World Cup? Mathematician's 11 models predict four possible champions (but NOT England!)
Embattled Gavin Newsom's stunning confession to Justin Trudeau caught on camera at World Cup when he thought no one was watching Secret list of celebrities attending billionaire Peter Thiel's invite-only society where elites learn about sex, cults and the next world war Malia and Sasha Obama steal the show during rare family outing for grand opening of dad Barack's library Haunting final video of beloved Bay Area coffee shop owner, 52, who vanished without a trace: Investigator reveals'unnerving' new clues found inside her home Watch horrifying drone video that follows woman's plunge to death after bungee team threw her from bridge without rope Tragic final moments of Hollywood legend's daughter and her husband revealed before being mysteriously found dead in their running SUV Ivanka Trump's youngest son, 8, spotted in middle of Knicks victory parade Scientists create first-ever'map' of female pleasure center that's confused men for centuries All my friends are suddenly getting divorced. Mid-life wives share taboo sex confessions about why they really leave... including common position that made one hate her husband: JANA HOCKING Taylor Swift's bottomless thirst for attention, her greed and sheer tackiness are now truly unbearable... this latest stunt has shown her true colors: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Mystery surrounds JD Vance's dash to Switzerland as world holds breath for Iranians to confirm peace deal Male Israeli hostage sexually assaulted by Hamas captor describes multiple attacks he suffered - blindfolded and stripped naked at knifepoint... and'brutal' 20-minute ordeal Boy, three, is thrown into crocodile enclosure at zoo: Man, 30, 'not known to him' arrested on suspicion of attempted murder Infection found in wildlife evolved to spread between humans, experts fear... after two clusters are identified Florida man hailed as a hero for jumping off of his bike to wrangle a dangerous 8-foot python... only to then be slapped with a $180 FINE Sensational REAL reason Jelly Roll is divorcing Bunnie XO: Insiders reveal'preacher's wife' bombshell that's the talk of Nashville... truth about legendary rocker cuckolding rumor... and G-string mishap Who will win the World Cup? Mathematician's 11 models predict four possible champions (but NOT England!) READ MORE: Supercomputer predicts England's World Cup journey England's World Cup journey begins tonight, but a mathematician warns that fans shouldn't get their hopes up. Dr Ari Joury, a particle physicist and founder of AI firm Wangari, created 11 different models to predict who will win this year's tournament. These digital tipsters crowned four different champions between them, but not a single one picked England. Seven models backed Spain, two singled out Argentina as the likeliest winner, while France and the Netherlands were each the favourite of one prediction system.
After Djokovic's historic loss, Roland-Garros will crown a first time major champion in years
Umpire Dan Bellino's baffling foul tip call on Seiya Suzuki renews calls for robot review in MLB Dakich: sports media has created an'industry' out of complaining about white athletes like Caitlin Clark Greg Sankey insists SEC is'strongest league' despite Big Ten winning three straight national championships Phillies look to upset Dodgers behind Zack Wheeler as Philadelphia's turnaround continues in LA Joey McGuire calls Steve Sarkisian's bluff, dares Texas to play Texas Tech in Week 1 Rams troublemaker WR Puka Nacua says he's a changed man after biting incident and stint in rehab Chiefs have no plans to release Rashee Rice and see jail time as a'life lesson' opportunity Greg Gutfeld on Dem joke: Men don't go where they aren't wanted Greg Gutfeld: Don't you just hate billionaires? Attorney calls attention to the'specificity' of anti-ICE agitators' chants Dr Oz: Is this a flaw or a feature? Father Mike Schmitz: Pope Leo XIV wants this world view in line with humanity's good Pompeo warns Iran will rebuild nuclear facilities'the moment' it gets the chance Purple Heart recipient speaks out after Graham Platner's controversial remarks'The Big Sunday Show' panel reacts to Novak Djokovic winning the Australian Open after being held out from competing in 2022 due to vaccine mandates. Novak Djokovic looked to have a manageable path to a record-breaking 25th major title after world No. 1 Jannik Sinner's historic collapse at Roland-Garros, also known as the French Open, but 19-year-old Brazilian Joรฃo Fonseca had other plans. Winner Joao Fonseca of Brazil greets Novak Djokovic of Serbia after their men's singles match on day 6 of the French Open at Court Philippe-Chatrier in Paris on May 29, 2026.
A Game Plan for the AI Boom
Ten years ago, AlphaGo trounced human competitors--and its legacy is still present in today's most advanced bots. Thore Graepel may have been the first human to be vanquished by a superintelligence. In 2015, on his first day as a researcher at Google DeepMind, he was challenged to play against the earliest iteration of AlphaGo--a computer program developed by DeepMind that would prove so effective at the ancient-Chinese game of (or Go, as it is commonly known in the West) that it changed how humans play it, and then upended the field of AI itself. When Graepel faced it, AlphaGo was just a "baby" project, as he put it to me, and he was an accomplished amateur player. But it still took him down.
Giant pumpkin growers face off for world gourd domination
There's a surprisingly competitive global race on to grow a 3,000-pound pumpkin. Ian (left) and Stuart Paton pose with a giant pumpkin in their nursery in the New Forest, Hampshire. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The pumpkin's name was Muggle and it weighed as much as a bull moose. At 2,819 pounds and over 21 feet in circumference, this enormous gourd claimed the dual titles of "heaviest pumpkin" and "largest pumpkin by circumference" in the on October 4, 2025.
Challenger-Based Combinatorial Bandits for Subcarrier Selection in OFDM Systems
Amiri, Mohsen, Venktesh, V, Magnรบsson, Sindri
This paper investigates the identification of the top-m user-scheduling sets in multi-user MIMO downlink, which is cast as a combinatorial pure-exploration problem in stochastic linear bandits. Because the action space grows exponentially, exhaustive search is infeasible. We therefore adopt a linear utility model to enable efficient exploration and reliable selection of promising user subsets. We introduce a gap-index framework that maintains a shortlist of current estimates of champion arms (top-m sets) and a rotating shortlist of challenger arms that pose the greatest threat to the champions. This design focuses on measurements that yield the most informative gap-index-based comparisons, resulting in significant reductions in runtime and computation compared to state-of-the-art linear bandit methods, with high identification accuracy. The method also exposes a tunable trade-off between speed and accuracy. Simulations on a realistic OFDM downlink show that shortlist-driven pure exploration makes online, measurement-efficient subcarrier selection practical for AI-enabled communication systems.
The Quest to Find the Longest-Running Simple Computer Program
The Busy Beaver Challenge, a notoriously difficult question in theoretical computer science, is now producing answers so large they're impossible to write out using standard mathematical notation. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107 and--wait for it--47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? These are the first five busy beaver numbers. They form a sequence that's intimately tied to one of the most notoriously difficult questions in theoretical computer science. Determining the values of busy beaver numbers is a daunting challenge that has attracted a cult following among both professional and amateur mathematicians for over 60 years. Researchers identified the first four busy beaver numbers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Position: There are no Champions in Long-Term Time Series Forecasting
Brigato, Lorenzo, Morand, Rafael, Strรธmmen, Knut, Panagiotou, Maria, Schmidt, Markus, Mougiakakou, Stavroula
Recent advances in long-term time series forecasting have introduced numerous complex prediction models that consistently outperform previously published architectures. However, this rapid progression raises concerns regarding inconsistent benchmarking and reporting practices, which may undermine the reliability of these comparisons. Our position emphasizes the need to shift focus away from pursuing ever-more complex models and towards enhancing benchmarking practices through rigorous and standardized evaluation methods. To support our claim, we first perform a broad, thorough, and reproducible evaluation of the top-performing models on the most popular benchmark by training 3,500+ networks over 14 datasets. Then, through a comprehensive analysis, we find that slight changes to experimental setups or current evaluation metrics drastically shift the common belief that newly published results are advancing the state of the art. Our findings suggest the need for rigorous and standardized evaluation methods that enable more substantiated claims, including reproducible hyperparameter setups and statistical testing.
Europe Scrambles for Relevance in the Age of AI
When a Finn talks to an AI helper like ChatGPT, they often get the sense that something is subtly wrong. "You really feel that this conversation is not the way that you would have a discussion in Finland," says Peter Sarlin. For a start, Finnish people are known for a blunt approach to dialog and chatbots are usually tuned to be overly courteous. But there's also the fact that most leading chatbots and the large language models behind them are developed in the US and trained on mostly US data. Cutting-edge AI products often come with a tonality that is essentially American.
Europe's AI 'champion' sets sights on tech giants in U.S.
Arthur Mensch, tall and lean with a flop of unkempt hair, arrived for a speech last month at a sprawling tech hub in Paris wearing jeans and carrying a bicycle helmet. He had an unassuming look for a person European officials are counting on to help propel the region into a high-stakes match with the United States and China over artificial intelligence. Mensch, 31, is the CEO and a founder of Mistral, considered by many to be one of the most promising challengers to OpenAI and Google. "You have become the poster child for AI in France," Matt Clifford, a British investor, told him onstage. A lot is riding on Mensch, whose company has shot into the spotlight just a year after he founded it in Paris with two college friends.
Emergent Braitenberg-style Behaviours for Navigating the ViZDoom `My Way Home' Labyrinth
Bayer, Caleidgh, Smith, Robert J., Heywood, Malcolm I.
The navigation of complex labyrinths with tens of rooms under visual partially observable state is typically addressed using recurrent deep reinforcement learning architectures. In this work, we show that navigation can be achieved through the emergent evolution of a simple Braitentberg-style heuristic that structures the interaction between agent and labyrinth, i.e. complex behaviour from simple heuristics. To do so, the approach of tangled program graphs is assumed in which programs cooperatively coevolve to develop a modular indexing scheme that only employs 0.8\% of the state space. We attribute this simplicity to several biases implicit in the representation, such as the use of pixel indexing as opposed to deploying a convolutional kernel or image processing operators.