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Qatar has become the place where FIFA experiments with the next generation of football technology. The results are already visible across this year's World Cup. To casual soccer viewers, the game may look like it always has--same green field, 22 players, a referee, and the familiar rhythm of play unfolding over 90 minutes. The changes are only visible if you look beneath the familiar surface. What appears to be a traditional match is now supported by layers of tracking systems, automated analysis, and real-time data that run quietly in the background.

Seekers then come and try to find the hiders and, this being an online video game, shoot them. It's frantic, silly and fiendishly creative: finding a spot on one of the maps that you feel confident to paint yourself into - whether it's a laundry room or a farm outbuilding - is a challenging artistic and perceptual task, as well as a neat game mechanic. Meccha Chameleon perfectly encapsulates two popular and interconnected indie genres - prop games (hide and seek, but people disguise themselves as everyday objects) and the slightly pejoratively named "friendslop" (accessible, crudely designed multiplayer titles). So no wonder it has sold 7m units in less than a month.

We propose two simple, principled and practical algorithms that enjoy provable scaling laws for the test-time compute of large language models (LLMs). The first one is a two-stage knockout-style algorithm: given an input problem, it first generates multiple candidate solutions, and then aggregate them via a knockout tournament for the final output. Assuming that the LLM can generate a correct solution with non-zero probability and do better than a random guess in comparing a pair of correct and incorrect solutions, we prove theoretically that the failure probability of this algorithm decays to zero exponentially or by a power law (depending on the specific way of scaling) as its test-time compute grows. The second one is a two-stage league-style algorithm, where each candidate is evaluated by its average win rate against multiple opponents, rather than eliminated upon loss to a single opponent. Under analogous but more robust assumptions, we prove that its failure probability also decays to zero exponentially with more test-time compute. Both algorithms require a black-box LLM and nothing else (e.g., no verifier or reward model) for a minimalistic implementation, which makes them appealing for practical applications and easy to adapt for different tasks. Through extensive experiments with diverse models and datasets, we validate the proposed theories and demonstrate the outstanding scaling properties of both algorithms.

From fake tickets to cloned websites, AI is magnifying World Cup scams. Can fans distinguish between what's real and what's not? You got a World Cup ticket. It arrived in your inbox with a QR code, professional branding, and a confirmation email that looked like the real thing. For years, spotting a scam was relatively simple.

The biggest World Cup ever is pushing fans, players, and host cities to their limits--and experts say this is only the beginning. It's often said that bigger means better. This year's FIFA World Cup may put that to the test. By almost any metric, the 2026 tournament is the largest ever: the most host countries; the longest distances between stadiums; the most players, teams, and matches; and then there's the eye-watering ticket prices . The scale is a logistical nightmare for fans, teams, and host cities. Held across three countries-- Canada, Mexico, and the US--48 teams (up from the usual 32) will navigate 16 host cities separated by thousands of miles and four distinct time zones.

The 2026 World Cup promises a global celebration. Many Arab fans may find themselves excluded. For the first time in World Cup history, eight Arab nations have qualified for this year's tournament, including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, and Jordan--double the number of teams that qualified for Qatar in 2022. Yet, the tournament is taking place at an unprecedented moment of heightened geopolitical tension. The US-Israel war with Iran, which began in February of this year, has caused ripple effects across Gulf states and neighboring countries in the Levant, including Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, reshaping the security around travel and mobility for fans and players hailing from the region. The US State Department has fully suspended visa issuance for nationals from countries with teams that qualified, including Iran and Haiti--despite it being the first time Haiti has qualified for a World Cup since 1974.

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

At 21, Speed has pushed the limits of streaming by transforming a distinctly solo format into a global group chat. His song for this year's World Cup is becoming the tournament's unofficial anthem. Streamer IShowSpeed is a huge soccer fan who plans to bring this year's World Cup to his millions of followers. In the days leading up to the 2026 World Cup, the streamer IShowSpeed--one of the most watched people on the planet, who occasionally moonlights as a rapper--released the music video " World Cup (Champions)," a song about flexing national pride where he mentions all 48 teams. As with everything the 21-year-old born Darren Watkins Jr. does, the video was instantly everywhere. The song racked up over 7 million views on YouTube in under 24 hours. The internet rushed to christen it as the anthem of the tournament, even though the World Cup already has one. FIFA, following a ridiculous outpouring from fans and perhaps realizing the massive instant exposure he could bring, added the song to its official album.