The old scarecrow of machines smarter than men becomes more plausible everyday.
No need to add on this great article from Ars Technica but really worth the read, for fans of video games but also the rest of the (doomed?) humans!
how-the-berkeley-overmind-won-the-2010-starcraft-ai-competition
On the plus side better artificial intelligences will breed incredibly helpful applications for humans...

What would be your dream usage of such an AI?

Posted via email from subversive's posterous

We are pleased to announce that we will present Hermes on September, 6th 2010 at the Decision Science Forum organized by Systems Navigator (www.systemsnavigator.com) the editor of Scenario Navigator the only cross simulation engine editor!

The Decision Science Forum is a conference on decision support technology and applications based on simulation, optimization and serious gaming. It is hosted in Amsterdam near the Schiphol Airport. The conference lasts for three days with two days spent on training to Scenario Navigator, Arena and Simio (both being discrete event simulation engine).

At the conference we will speak about Hermes which is the first serious game application to a discrete event simulation engine.

Posted via email from subversive's posterous

Serious Games are really seen now as an alternative to e-learning. We believe they are a lot more : by connecting to existing systems and software they can be a gateway to better business process, allowing simulation and collaborative work based on real company data. Follow this space as we will start showing new applications and start a discussion right here very soon!

The Good.

- Nice Body

- Nice Camera

The Bad.

- The Interface is bad. The keyboard is cluttered, with redundant

glyphs cluttering each key.

- 6 hardware buttons which don't work as you expect.

- Multiple ways to scroll the screen, which work differently in each

app. You can use the trackball, or the touch screen. Or accidentally

both at once.

I've spent a rather frustrating few days trying to force an old lady to sit in a chair. Not a real old lady, that would be cruel and probably illegal. No this is a model in a serious game we are developing. I had this crazy idea that it would be real easy to get her to sit in a chair. All I needed to do was move her to a standing position in the correct place relative to the chair, then blend to the sitting animation. Turned out it was easy to get it working, very hard to get it looking good though. Finally I realized that the problem is caused by two things

1) the sitting animation is 90degrees rotated from the standing. I guess if I had Max I'd have spotted that earlier. But I don't, so I didn't :(

Ryan Kelly gave an excellent talk about a library he has written which is named "Esky".

Why "Esky"? Because it keeps your frozen apps fresh, apparently.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/esky/

It is a great little tool for adding auto update facilities to your distributed (frozen) Python applications. Im looking forward to trying it out.

Posted via email from subversive's posterous