Who cares about kids when adult collectors are willing to pay top dollar? From the moment a pixelated Gengar and Nidorino faced off in the opening animation of the first games on the original Game Boy back in 1996, the franchise has been a perennial favorite of kids and adults alike. With 2026 marking 30th anniversary, Lego's first-ever collaboration with the enduringly popular monster-catching megahit is perfectly timed--a crossover of pop culture titans with just one problem: Anyone who isn't an ultra-fan with cavernously deep pockets isn't invited. The recent announcement of a line of Lego Pokémon wasn't a surprise--the Danish brick brand first revealed it had entered into a "multi-year partnership" with The Pokémon Company back in March 2025 --but the makeup of the range itself was. Despite the mass appeal, Lego is launching with just three sets, and every single one is age-rated 18+.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning and planning capabilities, driving extensive research into task decomposition. Existing task decomposition methods focus primarily on memory, tool usage, and feedback mechanisms, achieving notable success in specific domains, but they often overlook the trade-off between performance and cost. In this study, we first conduct a comprehensive investigation on task decomposition, identifying six categorization schemes. Then, we perform an empirical analysis of three factors that influence the performance and cost of task decomposition: categories of approaches, characteristics of tasks, and configuration of decomposition and execution models, uncovering three critical insights and summarizing a set of practical principles. Building on this analysis, we propose the Select-Then-Decompose strategy, which establishes a closed-loop problem-solving process composed of three stages: selection, execution, and verification. This strategy dynamically selects the most suitable decomposition approach based on task characteristics and enhances the reliability of the results through a verification module. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks show that the Select-Then-Decompose consistently lies on the Pareto frontier, demonstrating an optimal balance between performance and cost. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/summervvind/Select-Then-Decompose.

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are vital for ensuring enterprise security. Recently, Graph-based NIDS (GIDS) have attracted considerable attention because of their capability to effectively capture the complex relationships within the graph structures of data communications. Despite their promise, the reproducibility and replicability of these GIDS remain largely unexplored, posing challenges for developing reliable and robust detection systems. This study bridges this gap by designing a systematic approach to evaluate state-of-the-art GIDS, which includes critically assessing, extending, and clarifying the findings of these systems. We further assess the robustness of GIDS under adversarial attacks. Evaluations were conducted on three public datasets as well as a newly collected large-scale enterprise dataset. Our findings reveal significant performance discrepancies, highlighting challenges related to dataset scale, model inputs, and implementation settings. We demonstrate difficulties in reproducing and replicating results, particularly concerning false positive rates and robustness against adversarial attacks. This work provides valuable insights and recommendations for future research, emphasizing the importance of rigorous reproduction and replication studies in developing robust and generalizable GIDS solutions.

If you're looking for a birthday gift for the Pokémon fan who has everything (and we mean, every toy, card, item of apparel, game, Happy Meal collectable, etc.), the jewelry brand King Ice may have the solution. King Ice posted a photo on X and its website Wednesday teasing a new line of Pokémon jewelry pieces. The photo features the familiar face of Pikachu with a Poké Ball on his head decked out entirely in jewels. The X caption reads: "Collection dropping 6/14/24." This is not the first time the jewelry and clothing brand have collaborated with a big video game franchise. King Ice also sells a line of bejeweled Xbox themed necklaces, rings and earrings.

I am delighted to report that with the release of Super Mario Wonder, almost seven years into my parenting career, I have finally played a video game all the way through with one of my children. It was a journey that began with me hopefully playing Let's Go Pikachu! in 2018 (which my then-toddler hated so much that he would memorably shout "No, no, Pikachu!" at the screen), and now it has finally yielded genuine moments of joy as we worked our way through Wonder's madcap worlds. I was Mario, he played as Yoshi, a character designed for younger/less-experienced players, invulnerable to enemies and blessed with a helpfully generous flutter-jump. Initially this caused problems, because Yoshi cannot transform charmingly into an elephant or shoot bubbles from his hands with the appropriate power-up like Mario can – but once my kid realised that he could give me a ride across chasms on his back, giggling at Yoshi's expression of extreme consternation at having to bear the weight of an elephant, he was happy with the trade-off. We worked together through the levels, and for all the times I took the lead on tricky jumps or platforming challenges, he rescued me just as often when I fell foul of a Piranha Plant.

The recently released ChatGPT model demonstrates unprecedented capabilities in zero-shot question-answering. In this work, we probe ChatGPT for its conversational understanding and introduce a conversational framework (protocol) that can be adopted in future studies. The Pok\'emon universe serves as an ideal testing ground for auditing ChatGPT's reasoning capabilities due to its closed world assumption. After bringing ChatGPT's background knowledge (on the Pok\'emon universe) to light, we test its reasoning process when using these concepts in battle scenarios. We then evaluate its ability to acquire new knowledge and include it in its reasoning process. Our ultimate goal is to assess ChatGPT's ability to generalize, combine features, and to acquire and reason over newly introduced knowledge from human feedback. We find that ChatGPT has prior knowledge of the Pokemon universe, which can reason upon in battle scenarios to a great extent, even when new information is introduced. The model performs better with collaborative feedback and if there is an initial phase of information retrieval, but also hallucinates occasionally and is susceptible to adversarial attacks.

While several fans might feel slighted by Ash's exclusion in the series going forward, the far more revealing exclusion lies in Pikachu. Pikachu is easily the most iconic Pokémon of all time, and Nintendo and the Pokémon Company have heavily leaned into it as their mascot through several avenues. In fact, the Pokémon Company at one point felt that having a dedicated mascot for the franchise was so important that they needed it to become a duopoly. This is most evident by their push to make Eevee a co-mascot via the "Let's Go Pikachu" and "Let's Go Eevee" games. Some fans believe the thought process was that Eevee might be a counterpart that young girls could connect with more, as Pikachu represented more traits that young boys would connect with.

It's impressive to see how far the advancements behind artificial intelligence have come. To a certain extent, it's also pretty scary to know that some day, the jobs we'd normally require humans to do will be replaced by machines. One day, we might not need writers like myself producing the stories you read here. But aside from the potential downsides of artificial intelligence, it's absolutely mind-boggling what it can do with a certain set of restrictions, especially when it comes to generating art and realistic photographs. Heck, AI is already winning art competitions.

If you want to be the very best that no one ever was, you should read this tutorial on how to use an AWS Deep Learning AMI to train a Neural Network classifier in Python. The goal of this classifier is to give an image of a Gen 1 Pokemon, to identify it. That was a lot of acronyms and funny words, before we get started on the tutorial, let's cover some background information. AMI stands for Amazon Machine Image and is a template that is used to launch a virtual server (which in AWS is also known as an EC2 instance that you can read more about below). Since it is a template, you can use one AMI to launch multiple EC2 instances with the same configurations.

Movies based on videogames have a notoriously bad track record, but fantasy author Erin Lindsey says that the recent Tomb Raider reboot, while hardly original, was surprisingly well done. "They do the work of showing why Lara is capable of what she's capable of, and being believable in what she's not capable of," Lindsey says in Episode 415 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "It was done on a very human scale, and it was credibly acted, and they put in the work with the characters." Other recent videogame movies such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Detective Pikachu, and Rampage have connected with audiences and even earned respectable, though hardly stellar, reviews. Videogame journalist Blake J. Harris hopes that these successes will change the way people look at videogame movies. "A lot of people always have this caveat, like when Rampage made almost half a billion dollars, and people were like, 'Oh, well that one wasn't really a videogame movie,'" he says.