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Nintendo is making a live-action film adaption of The Legend of Zelda–a game franchise best known for its silent protagonist, an infinitely repeating plot, and a timeline so convoluted that trying to understand it inevitably drives one to madness. How do you adapt something like that into a two-hour film? It's tempting to say, "No one asked for this," but that's true of movies based on theme park rides, British teddy bears, and plastic blocks. There is no law that says movies based on video games--or any established intellectual property--must suck. And now that Nintendo has gotten a taste of that juicy box office, a Legend of Zelda movie was inevitable anyway.

The nature of war continues to evolve through the 21st century with conflict zones shifting from jungles and deserts to coastal cities. Not to mention the rapidly increasing commercial availability of cutting-edge technologies including UAVs and wireless communications. To help the Marine Corps best prepare for these increased complexities and challenges, the Department of Defense tasked DARPA with developing a digital training and operations planning tool. The result is the Prototype Resilient Operations Testbed for Expeditionary Urban Scenarios (PROTEUS) system, a real-time strategy simulator for urban-littoral warfare. When the PROTEUS program first began in 2017, "there was a big push across DARPA under what we call a sustainment focus area, and that included urban warfare," Dr. Tim Grayson, director of DARPA's Strategic Technology Office, told Engadget, looking at how to best support and "sustain" US fighting forces in various combat situations until they can finish their mission.

An event pitting an AI-controlled fighter plane against a human pilot in a virtual dogfight was recently held, with the end result that the AI managed to defeat its human opponent, adding another example of AIs outclassing humans at even extraordinarily complex tasks. As reported by DefenseOne, the recent virtual dogfight was orchestrated by the US military as part of an ongoing effort to demonstrate the capability of autonomous agents to defeat aircraft in dogfights, a project called the AlphaDogFight challenge. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) chose eight teams of AIs developed by various defense contractors, and pitted these AI teams against each other in virtual dogfights. The winner of this tournament was an AI developed by Heron Systems, and afterward the AI was pitted against a human pilot who wore a VR helmet and sat in a flight simulator. The AI reportedly won all five rounds it played.

The never-ending saga of machines outperforming humans has a new chapter. An AI algorithm has again beaten a human fighter pilot in a virtual dogfight. The contest was the finale of the U.S. military's AlphaDogfight challenge, an effort to "demonstrate the feasibility of developing effective, intelligent autonomous agents capable of defeating adversary aircraft in a dogfight. Last August, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, selected eight teams ranging from large, traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin to small groups like Heron Systems to compete in a series of trials in November and January. In the final, on Thursday, Heron Systems emerged as the victor against the seven other teams after two days of old school dogfights, going after each other using nose-aimed guns only. Heron then faced off against a human fighter pilot sitting in a simulator and wearing a virtual reality helmet, and won five rounds to zero. The other winner in Thursday's event was deep reinforcement learning, wherein artificial intelligence algorithms get to try out a task in a virtual environment over and over again, sometimes very quickly, until they develop something like understanding. Deep reinforcement played a key role in Heron System's agent, as well as Lockheed Martin's, the second runner up. Matt Tarascio, vice president of artificial intelligence, and Lee Ritholtz, director and chief architect of artificial intelligence, from Lockheed Martin told Defense One that trying to get an algorithm to perform well in air combat is very different than teaching software simply "to fly," or maintain a particular direction, altitude, and speed. Software will begin with a complete lack of understanding about even very basic flight tasks, explained Ritholtz, putting it at a disadvantage against any human, at first. "You don't have to teach a human [that] it shouldn't crash into the ground… They have basic instincts that the algorithm doesn't have," in terms of training. "That means dying a lot.

Four articles, published across the March through May issues of Communications, highlight how people are the unique source of the adaptive capacity essential to incident response in modern Internet-facing software systems. While it's reasonable for software engineering and operations communities to focus on the intricacies of technology, there is not much attention given to the intricacies of how people do their work. Ultimately, it is human performance that makes modern business-critical systems robust and resilient. As business-critical software systems become more successful, they necessarily increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes these systems inherently messy so that surprising incidents are part and parcel of the capability to provide services at larger scales and speeds.13

Cambridge, United Kingdom – Theo, a 12-year-old boy who is blind, is seated at a table in a crowded kitchen on a gray and drippy mid-December day. A headband that houses cameras, a depth sensor and speakers rings his sandy-brown hair. He swivels his head left and right until the camera in the front of the headband points at the nose of a person on the far side of a counter. Theo hears a bump sound followed by the name "Martin" through the headband's speakers, which are positioned above his ears. "It took me like five seconds to get you, Martin," Theo says, his head and body fixed in the direction of Martin Grayson, a senior research software development engineer with Microsoft's research lab in Cambridge.

When Grayson Kollins was two and a half years old--just shortly after the birth of his younger sister--his parents noticed that he had all but stopped uttering the sentences and phrases that up until then he had been using to communicate. In addition, his daycare provider mentioned that Grayson had begun repeating phrases over and over, and lacked interest in playing with other children. Grayson's father Scott Kollins, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the School of Medicine at Duke, was well aware of the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects the ability to socially interact and communicate with others. Although it usually manifests early in life, it is a lifelong condition and can have profound effects on learning, employment, and personal relationships. Prompted by these early symptoms, Grayson's parents subsequently had him assessed, and he received a clinical diagnosis of ASD.

When Grayson Kollins was two and a half years old--just shortly after the birth of his younger sister--his parents noticed that he had all but stopped uttering the sentences and phrases that up until then he had been using to communicate. In addition, his daycare provider mentioned that Grayson had begun repeating phrases over and over, and lacked interest in playing with other children. Grayson's father Scott Kollins, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the School of Medicine at Duke, was well aware of the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects the ability to socially interact and communicate with others. Although it usually manifests early in life, it is a lifelong condition and can have profound effects on learning, employment, and personal relationships. Prompted by these early symptoms, Grayson's parents subsequently had him assessed, and he received a clinical diagnosis of ASD.