The Game Developer's Conference, the largest event in the games industry, has hosted over 50 talks in the last decade about procedural generation, from small-scale independent speakers to large AAA companies, covering disciplines from programming to art to writing. Correspondingly, procedural generation has been an increasingly hot topic among game AI researchers in the last two decades. The Procedural Generation Workshop at FDG, now in its twelfth year, is one of the longest-running workshops in the field of game AI, and dedicated paper tracks at conferences are a regular occurrence. Despite the huge importance of content generation, and the wealth of time invested into developing practical techniques, the analysis of procedural generators is a relatively underdeveloped area of study. A few notable techniques have emerged over the last two decades of research [7, 8], as well as studies of efficacy [4, 9], but many of the techniques used by game researchers have changed little in that time. As a result, a lot of procedural generation work is done by'feel', with postmortems shared at events such as the Roguelike Celebration

Every month, Engadget features what our editors are currently into, whether it be video games, podcasts or gadgets. These are not official reviews; they're simply our first-hand experiences. This week, Senior Editor Nicole Lee gives her take on the Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker. A long-standing joke among my family and friends over the past couple of decades is that I'm not a true Asian. Because I didn't have a rice cooker.

Moments after plugging in Amazon's new Alexa-connected microwave I was about to review, the first thing I noticed was the word that popped up on its screen: FAIL. It hadn't--it had just jumped the gun a bit in the connection process, but that word hung over the testing process in surprising ways. The AmazonBasics Microwave is a 700-watt, 0.7-cubic foot appliance that costs a mere 60 dollars and connects with Amazon devices like the Echo, allowing you to control many of the microwave's functions with your voice. Say "Alexa, microwave 30 seconds" and the appliance starts whirring away on high. Trying "Alexa defrost ten ounces of fish" will result in more-regulated microwave blasts.

"I had a half-cup of oatmeal, with two-tablesoons of maple syrup and a cup of coffee. Oh, I put a handful of blueberries in the oatmeal, and there was milk in the coffee. Ask someone what they had for breakfast, and this is the kind of description you might get. And that's one of the reasons keeping track of food intake is such a problem for tech that's meant to help a person lose weight or stick to a diet for other reasons. Logging food for nutrition and calories is important to sticking to a diet, according to Susan Roberts, director of the Boston-based Energy Metabolism Lab at Tufts University. "It makes people more self-aware about the junk they are eating and how little they actually enjoy it, and the shock of huge portions, et cetera.