Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn't mean the songs convey complex meanings like our sentences do, it hints that whales may learn their songs in a similar way to how human infants start to understand language. Only male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing, and the behaviour is thought to be important for attracting mates. The songs are constantly evolving, with new elements appearing and spreading through the population until the old song is completely replaced with a new one. We're finally realising that many species are "We think it's a little bit like a standardised test, where everybody's got to do the same task but you can make changes and embellishments to show that you're better at the task than everybody else," says Jenny Allen at Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia.

Amazon has shared a list of video games that Prime members can snag for free this month, and there are some real gems. Additionally, the company revealed some new titles coming to the cloud-gaming platform Luna. BioShock Infinite Complete Edition is available right now. This version includes the full game, as originally released back in 2013, plus all of the various DLC and add-ons that came after. We called it "an easy story to fall in love with" in our official review, and that certainly stands to this day.

Ongoing advances in electronics and computing have introduced opportunities to achieve things that once seemed inconceivable: build autonomous machines, solve complex deep learning problems, and communicate instantaneously across the planet. Yet, for all the advances, today's systems--which rely on electronic processors--are grounded in a frustrating reality: the sheer physics of electrons limits their bandwidth and forces them to produce enormous heat, which means they draw vast amounts of energy. As demand for fast and low-energy artificial intelligence (AI) grows, researchers are exploring ways to push beyond electrons and into the world of photons. They are replacing electronic processors with photonic designs that incorporate lasers and other light components. While there is skepticism among some observers that the technology can transform analog computing, researchers in the optical space are now building systems demonstrating significant benefits in AI and deep learning.

We've been waiting to reexamine Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling for a long time, partly because we wanted new games to come out featuring Nvidia's updated algorithm. We also wanted to ask Nvidia as many questions as we could to really dig into the current state of DLSS. Today's article is going to cover everything. We'll be looking at the latest titles to use DLSS, focusing primarily on Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood, to see how Nvidia's DLSS 2.0 (as we're calling it) stacks up. This will include our usual suite of visual comparisons looking at DLSS compared to native image quality, resolution scaling, and various other post processing techniques. Then, of course, there will be a look at performance across all of Nvidia's RTX GPUs. We'll also be briefly reviewing the original launch games that used DLSS to see what's changed here, and there will be plenty of discussion on the RTX ecosystem, Nvidia's marketing, expectations, disappointments, and so on. Strap yourselves in because this is going to be a comprehensive look at where DLSS stands today.

Myst developer Cyan is running a Kickstarter campaign for a new game, Firmament, and Gearbox finally announced Borderlands 3. But that's just the start of this week's news, which also contained release date announcements for Heaven's Vault, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and Observation, plus the announcement of a new Divinity: Original Sin spinoff tactics game, CD Projekt teasing not one but two games before 2021, and free copies of Morrowind to celebrate the Elder Scrolls anniversary. This is gaming news for March 25 to 29. This week's free game offer is near and dear to my heart. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda is giving away free copies of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a.k.a.

On April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith, delivered a sermon to twenty thousand of his followers in Nauvoo, Illinois. The immediate occasion was the funeral of King Follett, a close friend of Smith's, and there is no doubt that death was on the prophet's mind. "God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!" Smith told the crowd. "That is the great secret." He continued: "You have got to learn how to be gods yourselves . . . the same as all gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead."

On April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith, delivered a sermon to twenty thousand of his followers in Nauvoo, Illinois. The immediate occasion was the funeral of King Follett, a close friend of Smith's, and there is no doubt that death was on the prophet's mind. "God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!" Smith told the crowd. "That is the great secret." He continued: "You have got to learn how to be gods yourselves . . . the same as all gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead."

First/third-person simulations in virtual environments have become increasingly used in training; however, creating intelligent, interactive characters to populate these environments presents a large authorial burden. Our work focuses on building tools to enable rapid creation of intelligent characters for first/third-person game-like environments with no programming knowledge required by the user. This is made possible using behavior-based control combined with a user interface employing natural language-like character specification in the form of English sentences and interactive testing during development.

Team coordination of non-player characters can create a deeper sense of immersion in real-time games by allowing characters to work together to produce better tactics and strategy. Achieving multi-agent coordination can be a difficult problem, and can incur substantial computational costs. Our goal with this work is to produce a reactive method for coordinating game characters that will allow computationally inexpensive team coordination. Reactive teaming creates teams of agents through the use of simple constant-time agent interactions without increasing the difficulty of authoring game characters.

With the most resource intensive tasks in games offloaded to special purpose processors, game designers now have the opportunity to build richer characters using more complex AI techniques than have been used in the past. While additional CPU time makes improved AI feasible, better tools for building agents are needed to make good interactive characters a reality. In this paper we present the BEHAVEngine and BehaviorShop which enable the creation of rich interactive characters.