Eight years ago, Blizzard Entertainment launched Hearthstone, a free-to-play smartphone game that took elements of physical card battlers such as Magic: the Gathering and the Pokémon trading card game, and married them to the developer's Warcraft franchise. The result was a spectacular global success that inspired an endless slew of similar deck-building games, all based around the same idea: you start with a small pack of digital cards, each with different powers, and you place them on the board against an opponent with a different deck. Designed by Ben Brode, one of the co-creators of Hearthstone, Marvel Snap is a fresh take on the genre, in which players build collections of superheroes, each with different power ratings, and battle with a human or AI opponent to control three locations in the middle of the game board. The beauty is in the stripped-down simplicity of the interface: there are only six turns in each game, and only four cards can be placed at each location. As rounds progress, participants are able to place more powerful heroes.

In this Machine Learning tutorial, we'll build a video game with Unity, TensorFlow and Python. We'll show you how easy it is to add ML-powered intelligence to video games or simulations, and how inference on smartphones is easier than it's ever been: modern, powerful tools like Unity's ML-Agents, Python, and TensorFlow make the complex easy. In this session, we'll build a little smartphone game, train a bot to play it using reinforcement learning, Python, and TensorFlow, and deploy it to a smartphone. We'll show you how easy it is to add ML-powered intelligence to video games or simulations, and how inference on smartphones is easier than it's ever been: modern, powerful tools like Unity's ML-Agents, Python, and TensorFlow make the complex easy. First, we'll spend 10 minutes of the session: Second, we'll spend 10 minutes of the session: Finally, we'll spend the last 10 minutes of the session: This is an engaging, fast-paced, and surprisingly in-depth exploration of how powerful modern game engines can be used for quick, relatively easy, but incredibly powerful state of the art machine learning and training, and how powerful inference on-device is, for mobile AI.

In this session, we'll build a little smartphone game, train a bot to play it using reinforcement learning, Python, and TensorFlow, and deploy it to a smartphone. We'll show you how easy it is to add ML-powered intelligence to video games or simulations, and how inference on smartphones is easier than it's ever been: modern, powerful tools like Unity's ML-Agents, Python, and TensorFlow make the complex easy. First, we'll spend 10 minutes of the session: * showcasing the absolute basics game engines * creating an arcade game, live on stage * adding some art, to make the game look pretty! Second, we'll spend 10 minutes of the session: * implementing an agent, using Python and TensorFlow, that is rewarded for playing the game * training the agent to play * giving the agent some character Finally, we'll spend the last 10 minutes of the session: * preparing our trained model for deployment onto a smartphone * building the game and optimizing both the gameplay and ML-components for a smartphone * showing the audience the game, running live on a phone! This is an engaging, fast-paced, and surprisingly in-depth exploration of how powerful modern game engines can be used for quick, relatively easy, but incredibly powerful state of the art machine learning and training, and how powerful inference on-device is, for mobile AI.

It's a modern day ritual practiced by some of the most passionate fans on the planet: gathering to observe the reveal of new video games. In June, some of the devoted assembled to pay tribute at Nintendo's Rockefeller Center store. Many wore Nintendo t-shirts, hats and other swag. The most hardcore dressed as their favorite characters, including one devotee in full-blown Luigi garb. They were there to watch a livestream of the company's latest "Nintendo Direct," a slickly-produced video announcing upcoming games and more, and get hands-on time with just-announced titles like Link's Awakening, a remake of a 1993 classic.

When 26-year-old Clementine Jacoby thinks back on her childhood, she remembers using printed maps to navigate strange new cities -- one of the many tools that smartphones have rendered largely obsolete. "My parents, I think, are just chronically bored," she says in a conference room at Google's New York offices. "We moved around a ton, and I was also sort of an agitated and ambitious kid and traveled a bunch on my own." It's perhaps fitting then that, after a year-long stint as a circus performer and graduating from Stanford University with a degree in symbolic systems (a program that focuses on a combination of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction), Jacoby ended up working as a product manager for Google Maps. It's a role that Jacoby feels like was made for her.

We could see Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda on smartphones and tablets as early as next year, the Wall Street Journal reports, referring to the Kyoto company's pledge to release a few mobile games based on its bestselling franchises per annual fiscal cycles. The report, if correct -- it's sourced vaguely to "people familiar with the matter" -- would be no great surprise. The Legend of Zelda is a cornerstone Nintendo property, far more recognizable to general audiences than something like Fire Emblem, a turn-based strategy roleplaying series that Nintendo brought to smartphones in early February. Or Animal Crossing, its next smartphone game, delayed but currently due by the end of March 2018. That's to say nothing of the whirlwind success of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a novel take on the fantasy adventure series that at last check has sold nearly 4 million copies between the Wii U and Switch.

The smartphone app would follow the release of'Animal Crossing,' expected during the second half of the year

Microsoft knows you don't run Windows on all of your gadgets, and it no longer cares. That, above all else, was the message the company conveyed for three whole days at its Build developer conference. Redmond is no longer trying to foist phones on consumers who don't want them. It stopped plugging its ears and pretending Google Docs and Chromebooks aren't a threat. And it won't beg people to throw out all of their devices and buy a dozen new ones so they can live their Best Windows Life.

In just over a week, the smartphone game "Pokemon Go" has become a giant hit, turning millions of people around the world into monster hunters. Given the game's promising start, investors are taking another look at Nintendo Co., whose value has shot up by about 1.5 trillion since "Pokemon Go" was released on July 6 in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Nintendo had been struggling in recent years as people shifted to playing games on smartphones rather than home or hand-held consoles, and the Kyoto-based game innovator was reluctant to enter the field. But last year, Nintendo finally announced it would jump into the smartphone fray. In that sense, some may wonder whether the early success of "Pokemon Go" is a prelude to Nintendo's return to the top of the video game heap.

With five gaming apps planned for release before March 2017, it's clear that Nintendo has big plans for the mobile gaming market, plans which it now appears could possibly involve the company creating its very own mobile gaming controller. So far Nintendo's mobile offerings have been the social media communication app Miitomo and the yet to be released mobile versions of Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing. None of these titles have mechanics that really cry out for controller support, however, notes taken at the company's recent 76th annual general shareholders meeting revealed that Nintendo is considering developing hardware as well as software as part of its mobile gaming venture. Though not the first time Mario ever appeared (he was originally called Jumpman in a Donkey Kong game) but this 1985 platformer on the NES was praised for "resurrecting a crashed American video game market" - it was the best ever selling video game up until Wii Sports took the title in 2006. As the first outing for Samus Aran in 1986, the female protagonist bounty hunter was said to be hugely inspired by Ridley Scott's 1979 horror film Alien.