final update
'At a loss for words' - Destiny 2 fans react to news support is ending
'At a loss for words' - Destiny 2 fans react to news support is ending The makers of Destiny 2 will stop releasing content updates for the game, effectively drawing to a close one of the industry's longest-running live-service eras. Bungie said the influential online shooter - which has attracted millions of players - will be getting its final update on 9 June, though it will remain playable beyond that. It follows months of fan speculation on the game's future following delays, falling player numbers and the release of Bungie's new shooter, Marathon. UK-based Destiny content creator My name is Byf posted: Saying goodbye like this is more painful than I can fathom, adding: I can only hope the road doesn't end here for good. For fans, the announcement may not have come as a complete surprise, but it was still met with shock and sadness. It's been my entire adult life, said Destiny YouTuber Datto in an emotional video update after the news was released.
Minecraft officially kills support for VR
If you ever thought about virtually wandering through Minecraft's Overworld in a VR headset, think again. Those days are over, at least from Microsoft's perspective. Microsoft's latest update to Minecraft's Bedrock Edition, version 1.21.80, Now, Minecraft remains as a game that can be played on multiple consoles and platforms -- just not VR. Vivecraft will allow Minecraft to continue, as a way to play the sandbox game on Oculus or Windows MR, according to the website.
Exploiting Adam-like Optimization Algorithms to Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks
Nanni, Loris, Maguolo, Gianluca, Lumini, Alessandra
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the main approach for training deep networks: it moves towards the optimum of the cost function by iteratively updating the parameters of a model in the direction of the gradient of the loss evaluated on a minibatch. Several variants of SGD have been proposed to make adaptive step sizes for each parameter (adaptive gradient) and take into account the previous updates (momentum). Among several alternative of SGD the most popular are AdaGrad, AdaDelta, RMSProp and Adam which scale coordinates of the gradient by square roots of some form of averaging of the squared coordinates in the past gradients and automatically adjust the learning rate on a parameter basis. In this work, we compare Adam based variants based on the difference between the present and the past gradients, the step size is adjusted for each parameter. We run several tests benchmarking proposed methods using medical image data. The experiments are performed using ResNet50 architecture neural network. Moreover, we have tested ensemble of networks and the fusion with ResNet50 trained with stochastic gradient descent. To combine the set of ResNet50 the simple sum rule has been applied. Proposed ensemble obtains very high performance, it obtains accuracy comparable or better than actual state of the art. To improve reproducibility and research efficiency the MATLAB source code used for this research is available at GitHub: https://github.com/LorisNanni.
Microsoft will shut down Minecraft Earth in June
Microsoft will be shutting down its augmented-reality version of Minecraft, known as Minecraft Earth, beginning in June, 2021, the company said Tuesday. Microsoft blamed the pandemic as a cause, as well as the lack of freedom of movement that the game required. At its core, Minecraft Earth was a game based upon exploration and discovery. During the early days of lockdown, my kids and I would wander around the neighborhood, looking for animals, ores, and dungeons to explore. But Microsoft said that the "current global situation" prevented the free movement and collaborative play that allowed Minecraft Earth to survive.