An off-screen image of an upcoming "Assassin's Creed" game has leaked online, with reports claiming that the new entry into the franchise will be called "Assassin's Creed: Origins." The off-screen image of "Assassin's Creed: Origins" was posted on Reddit by a user with the handle "shoutouttoashraf." The username is speculated to be referring to Ashraf Ismail, a Ubisoft employee that also worked on "Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag" and is also known to be working on the still-unannounced game, according to Eurogamer. A source has also confirmed to the gaming news site that the leaked image is legitimate. The leaked photo shows a player character on a wooden sailboat.

Peek into any of the commercial garages dotting San Francisco's Mission District and you'll find a mix of auto body shops and startups working on gleaming black-and-silver gizmos. On an intensely sunny afternoon in April, Shaper's staff rolled up its garage door to reveal a cluster of workbenches--all made by Shaper's handheld woodcutting tool, Origin, which goes on sale today. You may not think of yourself as a woodworker, but the founders of Shaper can change that. The tool is built to take the mystery--and most of the skill--out of cutting even complex shapes from a piece of wood. Grab Origin by the handles, place it on a piece of wood, and start tracing along the edges of the shape on Origin's touchscreen.

In a tidy workshop in San Francisco's Mission District, Joe Hebenstreit is surrounded by a curvy wooden chair, a carbon-fiber drone chassis, a beanbag-toss game, a copper bracelet, a carefully cut slab of kitchen counter top -- and the machine his company used to make all of them. Hebenstreit, formerly the lead design engineer of Google Glass computerized eyewear, now is chief executive of Shaper. The nine-person startup on Monday night began sales of a camera-enhanced, computer-guided cutting tool called the Origin. It tracks its own location so it can handle high-precision positioning as it guides you through a job. "It's like autocorrect for your hands," Hebenstreit said.

Twenty six hundred years ago, a band of Judahite soldiers kept watch on their kingdom's southern border in the final days before Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar. They left behind numerous inscriptions--and now, a groundbreaking digital analysis has revealed how many writers penned them. The research and innovative technology behind it stand to teach us about the origins of the Bible itself. "It's well understood that the Bible was not composed in real time but was probably written and edited later," Arie Shaus, a mathematician at Tel Aviv University told Gizmodo. "The question is, when exactly?" Shaus is one of several mathematicians and archaeologists trying to broach that question in a radical manner: by using machine learning tools to determine how many people were literate in ancient times.

Since production systems (PS's) were first proposed by Post (1943) general computational mechanism, the methodology has seen a great deal of development and has been applied to a diverse collection of problems. Despite the wide scope of goals and perspectives demonstrated by the various systems, there appear to be many recurrent themes. We present an analysis and overview of those themes, as well as a conceptual framework by which many of the seemingly disparate efforts can be viewed, both in relation to each other and to other methodologies. Accordingly, we use the term production system in a broad sense and show how most systems that have used the term can be fit into the framework. The comparison to other methodologies is intended to provide a view of PS characteristics in a broader context, with primary reference to procedurally based techniques, but also with reference to more recent developments in programming and the organization of data and knowledge bases.

Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first" approaches are merging into one integrated theory of individuation and evolution. We contribute to the maturation of this more inclusive approach by highlighting some problematic assumptions that still lead to an impoverished conception of the phenomenon of life. In particular, we argue that the new consensus has so far failed to consider the relevance of intermediate timescales. We propose that an adequate theory of life must account for the fact that all living beings are situated in at least four distinct timescales, which are typically associated with metabolism, motility, development, and evolution. On this view, self-movement, adaptive behavior and morphological changes could have already been present at the origin of life. In order to illustrate this possibility we analyze a minimal model of life-like phenomena, namely of precarious, individuated, dissipative structures that can be found in simple reaction-diffusion systems. Based on our analysis we suggest that processes in intermediate timescales could have already been operative in prebiotic systems. They may have facilitated and constrained changes occurring in the faster- and slower-paced timescales of chemical self-individuation and evolution by natural selection, respectively.

Grid representations offer many advantages for path planning. Lookups in grids are fast, due to the uniform memory layout, and it is easy to modify grids. But, grids often have significant memory requirements, they cannot directly represent more complex surfaces, and path planning is slower due to their high granularity representation of the world. The speed of path planning on grids has been addressed using abstract representations, such as has been documented in work on Dragon Age: Origins. The abstract representation used in this game was compact, preventing permanent changes to the grid. In this paper we introduce a sparse grid representation, where grid cells are only stored where necessary. From this sparse representation we incrementally build an abstract graph which represents possible movement in the world at a high-level of granularity. This sparse representation also allows the representation of three-dimensional worlds. This representation allows the world to be incrementally changed in under a millisecond, reducing the maximum memory required to store a map and abstraction from Dragon Age: Origins by nearly one megabyte. Fundamentally, the representation allows previously allocated but unused memory to be used in ways that result in higher-quality planning and more intelligent agents.

In fact, goal-driven hierarchical structure to concatenate simple human behavior is mostly constituted by goal-directed motor acts. This hierarchical goal structure as well as the actions based on the synergic composition of simpler rules, which connect individual motor elements, might be motor constituents chained together according to a precise paralleled to the syntactic organization of language.

EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base (TKB) on the environment. It is currently being converted into a domain-specific ontology, however, ontological properties are modelled according to surface semantics. For this reason, we are integrating our TKB in the form of a “satellite ontology” into FunGramKB, a multipurpose knowledge base specifically designed for natural language understanding. We explain how the dynamism of environmental concepts can benefit from a formal description in meaning postulates and their inclusion in FunGramKB Cognicon scripts. This would lead to the automatic generation of flexible conceptual networks and definitional templates across different contexts.

Not bad in the cash department, The items in this collage were selected (www.newscientist.com). 'In financial News" collection that can be found--complete than humans can track it--in whose Christie's spokeswoman Bendetta Roux When it comes to emerging technologies, aaai.org/aitopics/ Some items sold for well we know what we're afraid of, even Please note that: (1) an excerpt may not beyond what Christie's expected. Others though we may not know why. There is reflect the overall tenor of the item, nor didn't sell at all." no shortage of public debate about genetically contain all of the relevant information; modified crops, nanotechnology and and, (2) all items are offered "as is" and cloning.