It isn't always easy to detect cheating in chess Just three judiciously deployed cheats can turn an otherwise equal chess game into a near-certain victory, a new analysis shows - and systems designed to crack down on cheating might not notice the foul play. Daniel Keren at the University of Haifa in Israel simulated 100,000 matches using the powerful Stockfish chess engine - a computer system that, at its maximum power, is better at playing chess than any human world champion. The matches were played between two computer engines competing at the level of an average chess player - 1500 on the Elo rating scale typically used to calculate skill level in chess. Half the games were logged without any further intervention, while the other half allowed occasional intervention by a stronger computer chess "player" with an Elo score of 3190 - a higher rating than any human player has ever achieved. Competitors usually have a slim advantage when playing white, with a 51 per cent chance of winning, on average, tied to the fact that they make the game's first move.

In Environment Design, one interested party seeks to affect another agent's decisions by applying changes to the environment. Most research on planning environment (re)design assumes the interested party's objective is to facilitate the recognition of goals and plans, and search over the space of environment modifications to find the minimal set of changes that simplify those tasks and optimise a particular metric. This search space is usually intractable, so existing approaches devise metric-dependent pruning techniques for performing search more efficiently. This results in approaches that are not able to generalise across different objectives and/or metrics. In this paper, we argue that the interested party could have objectives and metrics that are not necessarily related to recognising agents' goals or plans. Thus, to generalise the task of Planning Environment Redesign, we develop a general environment redesign approach that is metric-agnostic and leverages recent research on top-quality planning to efficiently redesign planning environments according to any interested party's objective and metric. Experiments over a set of environment redesign benchmarks show that our general approach outperforms existing approaches when using well-known metrics, such as facilitating the recognition of goals, as well as its effectiveness when solving environment redesign tasks that optimise a novel set of different metrics.

Goal Recognition Design (GRD) is the task of redesigning environments (either physical or virtual) to allow efficient online goal recognition. In this work we formulate the redesign problem as an optimization problem, aiming at early goal recognition. To this end, we use a measure of worst case distinctiveness (wcd), which represents the maximal number of steps an agent may take before his goal is revealed. With the objective ofminimizing wcd, we construct a search space in which each node in the space is a goal recognition model (one of which is the original model given as input) and one can move from one model to another by applying a model modification, chosen from a set of allowed modifications given as input. Our specific contribution in this work includes the specification of a class of modifications for which we can prune the search space using strong stubborn sets. Such positioning allows reducing the computational overhead of design while preserving completeness. We show that the proposed modification class generalizes previous works in goal recognition design and enriches the state-of-the-art with new modifications for which strong stubborn set pruning is safe. We support our approach by an empirical evaluation that reveals the performance gain brought by the proposed pruning strategy in different goal recognition design settings.

Alongside major franchises like Candy Crush and Angry Birds, indie games have played a major part in popularizing apps and games on smartphones. Thanks to Apple, they'll soon be getting prime real estate on Apple's storefront. Apple will launch a dedicated section on the App Store Thursday that exclusively showcases games from indie developers, according to Polygon. The permanent update comes after Apple's current sale on indie titles. For the promotion, Apple offered discounts on titles including platformer VVVVVV and puzzler Prune .

When humans learn a new concept, they might ignore examples that they cannot make sense of at first, and only later focus on such examples, when they are more useful for learning. We propose incorporating this idea of tunable sensitivity for hard examples in neural network learning, using a new generalization of the cross-entropy gradient step, which can be used in place of the gradient in any gradient-based training method. The generalized gradient is parameterized by a value that controls the sensitivity of the training process to harder training examples. We tested our method on several benchmark datasets. We propose, and corroborate in our experiments, that the optimal level of sensitivity to hard example is positively correlated with the depth of the network. Moreover, the test prediction error obtained by our method is generally lower than that of the vanilla cross-entropy gradient learner. We therefore conclude that tunable sensitivity can be helpful for neural network learning.

Goal recognition design involves the offline analysis of goal recognition models by formulating measures that assess the ability to perform goal recognition within a model and finding efficient ways to compute and optimize them. In this work we relax the full observability assumption of earlier work by offering a new generalized model for goal recognition design with non-observable actions. A model with partial observability is relevant to goal recognition applications such as assisted cognition and security, which suffer from reduced observability due to sensor malfunction or lack of sufficient budget. In particular we define a worst case distinctiveness (wcd) measure that represents the maximal number of steps an agent can take in a system before the observed portion of his trajectory reveals his objective. We present a method for calculating wcd based on a novel compilation to classical planning and propose a method to improve the design using sensor placement. Our empirical evaluation shows that the proposed solutions effectively compute and improve wcd.