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hey, gonna be real here, that symbol is the most evil thing i’ve ever seen in my entire fucking life, and I Am Filled With Dread
kallistis
nice
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Tinspider’s first steps at the Exploratorium! 🕷
We’re all going to die
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The epidemic began on September 13, 2005, when Blizzard introduced a new raid called Zul’Gurub into the game as part of a new update. Its end boss, Hakkar, could affect players by using a debuff called Corrupted Blood, a disease that damages players over time, this one specifically doing significant damage. The disease could be passed on between any nearby characters, and would kill characters with lower levels in a few seconds, while higher level characters could keep themselves alive. It would disappear as time passed or when the character died. Due to a programming error, players’ pets and minions carried the disease out of the raid.
Non-player characters could contract the disease but were asymptomatic to it and could spread it to others.[2] At least three of the game’s servers were affected. The difficulty in killing Hakkar may have limited the spread of the disease. Discussion forum posters described seeing hundreds of bodies lying in the streets of the towns and cities. Deaths in World of Warcraft are not permanent, as characters are resurrected shortly afterward.[3] However, dying in such a way is disadvantageous to the player’s character and incurs inconvenience.[4]
During the epidemic, normal gameplay was disrupted. Player responses varied but resembled real-world behaviors. Some characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some lower-level characters who could not help would direct people away from infected areas, some characters would flee to uninfected areas, and some characters attempted to spread the disease to others.[2] Players in the game reacted to the disease as if there was real risk to their well-being.[5] Blizzard Entertainment attempted to institute a voluntary quarantine to stem the disease, but it failed, as some players didn’t take it seriously, while others took advantage of the pandemonium.[2] Despite certain security measures, players overcame them by giving the disease to summonable pets.[6] Blizzard was forced to fix the problem by instituting hard resets of the servers and applying quick fixes.[3]
The major towns and cities were abandoned by the population as panic set in and players rushed to evacuate to the relative safety of the countryside, leaving urban areas filled to the brim with corpses, and the city streets literally white with the bones of the dead.[7]
lesbophobes
Orgrimmar during the incident.
This is legitimately one of the most fascinating events in online and/or gaming history to date.
This post leaves out the most incredible part, which is that the CDC straight up contacted Blizzard and asked for all the data they had on the Corrupted Blood Plague for the purposes of refining their models of epidemic behavior in real human populations.
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A computer beat a human in chess 20 years ago. But chess is relatively simple. The ancient Chinese game of Go is thought to be the most complex game ever created.
“There are more possible ‘Go’ positions than there are atoms in the Universe,” says Demis Hassabis.
He works at Google DeepMind, the search engine’s artificial intelligence company. Hassabis and his teammates built a program called AlphaGo that could learn to play the game. It studied 100,000 human matches, and then played millions more against itself.
Now that program is being put the test in a series of five matches against Go champion Lee Sedol.
The first match lasted 3 hours and 33 minutes. Sedol lost. You can watch it here.
The second match lasted 4 hours and 22 minutes. Sedol lost again. You can watch that too.
The losses came as a surprise. Though AlphaGo has already beaten lower ranked Go players, experts predicted it would be another decade before artificial intelligence could beat a Go champion. If Sedol loses his next game (scheduled for Saturday), he’ll have lost the series.
HO-LY SHIT. You guys need to understand how HUGE this is. Go was the last game where computers couldn’t beat even a talented amateur, and we thought it would be DECADES before that changed–if ever.
Go can’t be broken like chess: there are so many possible positions and moves that brute force calculation gets you nowhere. It’s also impossible to objectively measure the value of the material on the board. In chess, each piece has a certain numerical value. In Go, every stone has the same value as every other stone, and advantage is conferred not necessarily by how many stones you have on the board, but on their relative positions. Even 9-dan Go players (the equivalent of a chess grand master) often have difficulty explaining how they know a move is the right one, or even how they can tell who is winning. Described by experts as “infinitely more subtle than chess,” Go was the last great barrier to machine domination because it is profoundly and inescapably intuitive.
The other reason this is so wild is because NOBODY’S HEARD OF THIS PROGRAM BEFORE? I’ve been following the development of Go programs for about five years. The frontrunners - Zen, Crazy Stone, one or two others - have been tested and competed against one another and slowly tweaked and refined for years. If you’re interested in this story, you’ve heard of them. But the Google program dropped out of nowhere. Guys, this is like when Beyonce dropped an album without telling anybody. For computer nerds and watchers of AI development, this is that exciting.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Holy shit.
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Science is Amazing: An A.I. Designed to Play League of Legends Was Found Playing Cave Story Instead.
Researchers at MIT were surprised when they discovered that an A.I. which was designed to play League of Legends was instead found playing the popular indie game, Cave Story. The A.I., dubbed Playtron 2000, was created to test logic and learning in machines. “We wanted to create an A.I. that could learn and strategize over time based on its experiences.” spoke Dr. Richards, head researcher at MI, “We chose League of Legends as Playtron 2000′s testing grounds as we wanted to see how an A.I. that was designed to learn from its mistakes would go up against an expect human player.”
However, the researchers plans were cut short when they found on Tuesday morning that Playtron 2000 had uninstalled League of Legends and installed Cave Story in its wake. “At first we thought there may have been an error in Playtron 2000′s code,” spoke Dr. Richards, “but we discovered that Playtron 2000 had indeed gone through a complex trial and error process and had made its decision entirely logically.”
Similar experiments were ran earlier this year with two A.I.’s designed to play DOTA 2, which ended in the A.I.’s uninstalling DOTA 2 to play Bejeweled and Castle Crashers respectively. Research into why this happens is still ongoing.
Robot uninstalls shit game for a better one
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Scientists from MIT have designed a next-generation spacesuit that acts practically as a second skin, and could revolutionize the way future astronauts travel into space. (Photo : Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT)
Astronauts are used to climbing into conventional bulky, gas-pressurized spacesuits, but this new design could allow them to travel in style. Soon they may don a lightweight, skintight and stretchy garment lined with tiny, muscle-like coils. Essentially the new suit acts like a giant piece of shrink-wrap, in which the coils contract and tighten when plugged into a power supply, thereby creating a “second skin.”
"With conventional spacesuits, you’re essentially in a balloon of gas that’s providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure,] to keep you alive in the vacuum of space," lead researcher Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, said in astatement.
"We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure - applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. We combine passive elastics with active materials. … Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration."
Newman, who has worked for the past decade on a design for the next-generation spacesuit, describes the new garment in detail in the journal IEEE/ASME: Transactions on Mechatronics.
The MIT BioSuit’s coils, which are a main feature of the outfit, are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA). At a certain temperature, the material can “remember” and spring back to its engineered shape after being bent or misshapen.
Skintight suits are not a novel idea, but in the past scientists have always struggled with the question: how do you get in and out of a suit that is so tight? That’s where the SMAs come in, allowing the suit to contract only when heated, and subsequently stretched back to a looser shape when cooled.
Though the lightweight suit may not seem at first like it can withstand the harsh environment that is outer space, Newman and his colleagues are sure that the BioSuit would not only give astronauts much more freedom during planetary exploration, but it would also fully support these space explorers.
Newman and his team are not only working on how to keep the suit tight for long periods of time, but also believe their design could be applied to other attires, such as athletic wear or military uniforms.
"An integrated suit is exciting to think about to enhance human performance," Newman added. "We’re trying to keep our astronauts alive, safe, and mobile, but these designs are not just for use in space."
Scuse you, Dava Newman is a FEMALE professor at MIT.
(fyi, I passed out in a vacuum chamber wearing an earlier version of this suit. =D)
Source: natureworldnews.com
Scientists from MIT Developed a Trillion frames per second slow motion camera that can show light moving through a bottle. Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography - For comparison, the imaging of a bullet captured at this many frames per second would last a year as explained in thepresentation by Professor Ramesh Raskar of MIT.
[video]
^ what you have witnessed above is light travelling in slow motion.
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