Month: May 2019

Enlarge / Representation of some of the behaviors developed by the FTW algorithm. (credit: Deep Mind)

Google's AI subsidiary Deep Mind has built its reputation by building systems that learn to play games by playing each other, starting with little more than the rules and what constitutes a win. That Darwinian approach of improvement through competition has allowed Deep Mind to tackle complex games like chess and Go, where there are vast numbers of potential moves to consider.

But at least for board games like those, the potential moves are discrete and don't require real-time decisionmaking. It wasn't unreasonable to question whether the same approach would work for completely different classes of games. Such questions, however, seem to be answered by a report in today's issue of Science, where Deep Mind reveals the development of an AI system that has taught itself to play Quake III Arena and can consistently beat human opponents in capture-the-flag games.

Not a lot of rules

Chess' complexity is built from an apparently simple set of rules: an 8 x 8 grid of squares and pieces that can only move in very specific ways. Quake III Arena, to an extent, gets rid of the grid. In capture-the-flag mode, both sides start in a spawn area and have a flag to defend. You score points by capturing the opponent's flag. You can also gain tactical advantage by "tagging" (read "shooting") your opponents, which, after a delay, sends them back to their spawn.

Enlarge / The Galaxy Note 9.

Android Police has a report on the Galaxy Note 10 that Samsung fans probably won't be happy with. David Ruddock claims the Galaxy Note 10 will be Samsung's first flagship to remove the headphone jack, taking one of the last wired audio options off the flagship market.

Samsung isn't just stripping away the headphone jack, though; the report claims the phone will also lack physical buttons. The volume rocker, power button, and Bixby button "will be replaced by capacitive or pressure-sensitive areas, likely highlighted by some kind of raised 'bump' and/or texture along the edge," according to the report. This is something we've seen HTC do with the U12+ last year.

Physical buttons can be a failure point for a phone. The cutouts weaken the case and make devices more susceptible to bending. Plus, like a headphone jack, they're an ingress point for dust and water. Still, Samsung was able to score an IP68 water and dust resistance rating on the Galaxy S10 with both of these features.

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  A familiar face, but Captain John Price returns to Call of Duty in an entirely new timeline and plot. [credit: Infinity Ward / Activision ]

WOODLAND HILLS, Calif.—The rumors are all true. The next AAA military shooter from Activision and Infinity Ward, coming to PCs and consoles on October 25, will be titled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Don't let the name fool you: some of its content is decidedly unfamiliar.

Despite reusing the old series name without a number attached, this game is neither a remake nor a remaster. CoD:MW hits reset on the series' timeline. Infinity Ward has rewound a few of its familiar characters and concepts, then placed them in an entirely new, "current-day" storyline. The development team is doing this in part to usher in a first for the series: an entire half of the campaign played from the perspective of an Arab soldier.

This woman character, hailing from an unnamed Middle Eastern country, was introduced to a select group of journalists earlier this month at Infinity Ward's Los Angeles-area headquarters, and her military allegiance was left unclear. At this "pre-E3" event, we watched "real-time gameplay" from two missions, and both emphasized a level of realistic rendering and brutality comparable to the visceral Last of Us series.

This video contains some minor spoilers for a non-critical location in the game.

Chances are good that you already have This War of Mine in your Steam library. The side-view, survival-horror adventure game is a perennial favorite on various Steam sales, and at least 4.5 million people have picked up a copy since its release in 2014. But as with many Steam sale titles, it's perhaps a bit less likely that you've played the game—and if you haven't, that's a shame, because it's damn good.

But it's also a hard game to experience—and I'm not talking about the difficulty level. This War of Mine's developers are Polish, and they come from a country and a culture that still bears the scars of post-war Nazi occupation. Lead programmer Aleksander Kauch explained that one of the primary things developer 11 Bit Studios wanted to do with TWoM was to bring the stories of his grandparents to life—to put players into a place where joy and normalcy have been replaced by starvation and bleakness, where there are no good choices, and where the biggest and best thing you have to hope for is that you might scavenge enough supplies to live a few more days.

Enlarge / Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud. (credit: Wikimedia Commons/Alain r)

Israeli physicists think they have confirmed one of the late Stephen Hawking's most famous predictions by creating the sonic equivalent of a black hole out of an exotic superfluid of ultra-cold atoms. Jeff Steinhauer and colleagues at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) described these intriguing experimental results in a new paper in Nature.

The standard description of a black hole is an object with such a strong gravitational force that light can't even escape once it moves behind a point of no return known as the event horizon. But in the 1970s, Hawking demonstrated that—theoretically, at least—black holes should emit tiny amounts of radiation and gradually evaporate over time.

Blame the intricacies of quantum mechanics for this Hawking radiation. From a quantum perspective, the vacuum of space continually produces pairs of virtual particles (matter and antimatter) that pop into existence and just as quickly annihilate away. Hawking proposed that a virtual particle pair, if it popped up at the event horizon of a black hole, might have different fates: one might fall in, but the other could escape, making it seem as if the black hole were emitting radiation. The black hole would lose a bit of its mass in the process. The bigger the black hole, the longer it takes to evaporate. (Mini-black holes the size of a subatomic particle would wink out of existence almost instantaneously.)