The objective for each model requires the other, but neither are known. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce Inverse-W eighted Survival Games .

The year is 1962 and you've just woken up in the shadow of the Windscale (now Sellafield) nuclear power station in Cumbria, five years after its catastrophic meltdown. Trapped in the sizeable quarantine zone surrounding the accident site, you must stay alive long enough to figure out how to escape – a task made rather more challenging by the presence of aggressive cultists, irradiated monsters and highly territorial terror bees. Imagine Stalker, but set in northern England, and you're edging towards what Oxford-based developer Rebellion has in store. Fallout may seem like another obvious inspiration for this irradiated game world, but after playing a two-hour demo, it's clear the game draws more from classic British sci-fi. Here you are, stuck in the picturesque Lake District, with its lush woodlands, gurgling rivers and dry-stone walls.

Intelligence is a crucial trait for species to find solutions within a limited number of trial-and-error attempts. Building on this idea, we introduce Survival Game as a framework to evaluate intelligence based on the number of failed attempts in a trial-and-error process. Fewer failures indicate higher intelligence. When the expectation and variance of failure counts are both finite, it signals the ability to consistently find solutions to new challenges, which we define as the Autonomous Level of intelligence. Using Survival Game, we comprehensively evaluate existing AI systems. Our results show that while AI systems achieve the Autonomous Level in simple tasks, they are still far from it in more complex tasks, such as vision, search, recommendation, and language. While scaling current AI technologies might help, this would come at an astronomical cost. Projections suggest that achieving the Autonomous Level for general tasks would require $10^{26}$ parameters. To put this into perspective, loading such a massive model requires so many H100 GPUs that their total value is $10^{7}$ times that of Apple Inc.'s market value. Even with Moore's Law, supporting such a parameter scale would take $70$ years. This staggering cost highlights the complexity of human tasks and the inadequacies of current AI technologies. To further investigate this phenomenon, we conduct a theoretical analysis of Survival Game and its experimental results. Our findings suggest that human tasks possess a criticality property. As a result, Autonomous Level requires a deep understanding of the task's underlying mechanisms. Current AI systems, however, do not fully grasp these mechanisms and instead rely on superficial mimicry, making it difficult for them to reach an autonomous level. We believe Survival Game can not only guide the future development of AI but also offer profound insights into human intelligence.

The biggest story of the year so far in games has been Palworld, the "Pokémon-with-guns" early access game that broke and rebroke concurrent player records on PC. It's showing a few signs of being unsustainable, as those player numbers have dropped off in recent weeks and the developers reveal the eye-watering cost of keeping servers online for so many people (almost 6m a year), but it's still in with a shot of being 2024's biggest game in terms of pure revenue. There's something a little unsavoury about Palworld that has other developers and critics wrinkling their noses. It's not just the ick of turning guns on creatures that are, unlike Minecraft's blocky animals, designed to look cute. Its character designs are so close to Pokémon's that it has sparked allegations of plagiarism, with some 3D models of the game's creatures aligning improbably closely with those from recent Pokémon games.

This term is a portmanteau derived from two beloved games that arrived on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the mid-1980s, Metroid and Castlevania, and is usually applied to 2D games in which the world is explorable in all directions (as opposed to classic platform games, in which you go from left to right). There are usually secret rooms and areas that can only be accessed once you've found some key or item later on, so players have to mentally map their progress and backtrack when necessary. In this way a good metroidvania world is like a story, with tension, foreshadowing, plants, payoffs and surprise reveals built into the very foundations. Try: Hollow Knight, Axiom Verge, Ori and the Blind Forest. One of the most popular indie game genres, the term roguelike comes from the 1980 game Rogue, originally developed by coders Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman.

Valheim is Steam's latest top-selling, out-of-nowhere indie game, and from some angles, it sure looks the part. Depending on what screenshots you stumble upon, you might get some serious PlayStation 1 nostalgia vibes, with characters, animals, and trees that look straight out of the first '90s Tomb Raider game. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. We've seen this before when it comes to Steam Early Access hits, usually because a game maker spends more time on gameplay and depth, not screenshots.

If you're hopping over from the PlayStation country, or just picking up your first game console, there are plenty of worthy Xbox titles worth diving into. Sure, Microsoft hasn't been as aggressive as Sony when it comes to hustling for big budget exclusives, something we knocked the Xbox Series X for in our review. Still, it's not as if there's nothing to play. And Microsoft has one major advantage that Sony doesn't: Xbox Game Pass, its subscription service with a rotating selection of popular titles. Notably, Game Pass also gives you access to every first-party Xbox game the day they launch, and those titles never leave the service. That alone makes the subscription a much better deal than spending $60 on a new release.

I was understandably apprehensive when I first heard about "Grounded," a game from Obsidian. "Grounded" is stressful in ways similar to most survival games. You scavenge for resources, build shelters, and manage your hunger, health, thirst and limited stamina. Your foes are all gargantuan insects, and spiders are a frequent antagonist -- among the toughest to overcome.

From the developers of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, it sends the player out to face creatures drawn from the gnarliest Greek legends and rescue the gods. A platform game for anyone who thinks video games are too easy these days, Ori draws its play inspiration from classics such as Mario, Mega Man and Metroid, but its looks are bang up to date. Guiding a spirit through an intensely beautiful forest, you'll come up against puzzles and obstacles that challenge both your mind and your reflexes. Let's hope they're still sharp. Originally released in 1997, Final Fantasy VII is one of the most beloved and acclaimed role-playing titles of all time.

How do you get machines to perform better? Tell them they could croak at any minute. In a new paper from the University of Southern California, scientists say that "in a dynamic and unpredictable world, an intelligent agent should hold its own meta-goal of self-preservation." Lead researcher Antonio Damasio is a luminary in the field of intelligence and the brain. In his profile at the Edge Foundation, they say Damasio "has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying emotions, feelings, decision-making and consciousness."