We initially heard about a team modding an RTX remaster of Half-Life 2 last August. Today, NVIDIA released a trailer giving fans a behind-the-scenes look at Orbifold Studios' efforts to apply more modern graphics tools to the iconic title. The video highlights the RTX Remix engine and how the team is using it to make visual upgrades to a game with an engine two decades old. They have examples of how they're creating more dynamic light sources, volumetric fog in moody areas, and full 3D detail on the objects in the environment. The crew at Orbifold still doesn't have a release date for their work, but as the 20th anniversary for Half-Life 2 approaches on November 16, it's possible that there may be something official in the works from Valve.

The Model Parameter Randomisation Test (MPRT) is highly recognised in the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) community due to its fundamental evaluative criterion: explanations should be sensitive to the parameters of the model they seek to explain. However, recent studies have raised several methodological concerns for the empirical interpretation of MPRT. In response, we propose two modifications to the original test: Smooth MPRT and Efficient MPRT. The former reduces the impact of noise on evaluation outcomes via sampling, while the latter avoids the need for biased similarity measurements by re-interpreting the test through the increase in explanation complexity after full model randomisation. Our experiments show that these modifications enhance the metric reliability, facilitating a more trustworthy deployment of explanation methods.

The march of time is inevitable. Whether the horse and buggy are replaced by the automobile or the slide rule is replaced by the calculator, everything eventually becomes obsolete. And if you listen to the rumors, this time around, it's search engine optimization. Rest in peace, SEO: 1997-2022. SEO is still alive and kicking. It's just as relevant today as it has ever been.

If you visited Robohub this week, you may have spotted a big change: how this blog looks now! On Tuesday (coinciding with Ada Lovelace Day and our '50 women in robotics that you need to know about' by chance), Robohub got a massive modernisation on its look by our Technical Editor Ioannis K. Erripis and his team. There are many improvements and new features but the biggest update apart from the code is the design which is more clean and simple looking (especially on the single post view). This fresher look has recently been tested on our sister project, AIhub.org. As Ioannis says, it offers a cleaner, simpler and more readable way to access the content from the robotics community that we post in this blog.

Did medical knowledge engineering/search/expert systems. Every human bliss and kindness, every suspicion, cruelty, and torment ultimately comes from the whirring 3-pound "enchanted loom" that is our brain and its other side, the cloud of knowing that is our mind. It's an odd coincidence that serious study of the mind and the brain bloomed in the late 20th century when we also started to make machines that had some mind-like qualities. Now, with information technology we have applied an untested amplifier to our minds, and cranked it up to eleven, running it around the clock, year after year. Because we have become a culture of crisis, we are good at asking, what has gone wrong? But is the conjunction of natural and artificial mind only ill-favored, or might we not learn from both by comparison?

Your code is more complicated than you think. One of the first things every software developer learns about is the command-line. At its core, the command-line is a list of strings that are typically broken down into flags (e.g., -- verbose) and arguments (e.g., -- port 80). This is enough for many simple applications. You can define 2 to 3 command-line arguments in a command-line interface (CLI) parsing library, and you are done.

Microsoft gave its Cortana app for iOS a facelift Friday, replacing its old black and blue aesthetic with a new look that puts the assistant's key features at users' fingertips. The app now features Quick Actions, so that users can tap a couple buttons and get Cortana to create an alarm, set a reminder, or tell them a joke. That means users can get at key features without having to talk or type queries, and it also gives them a framework for what they can do with the app, without them having to discover it on their own. The virtual assistant market is a crowded one, between Cortana, Siri, Alexa and the Google Assistant all competing for users' time and interest. Microsoft's assistant is built deeply into PCs with Windows 10, but the company also needs to keep its apps for other mobile platforms up to date in order to meet users where they are.