Lifeboat Foundation

The year 2019 is going to be a big one for movies. There are several movies coming out in the upcoming year with all genres of film getting some big titles.

A lot of science fiction movies are hitting theaters in 2019, but fans will have to wait a bit longer for some anticipated titles.

As impressive as all these feats were, game-playing AI typically exploit the properties of a single game and often rely on hand-crafted knowledge coded into them by developers. But DeepMind’s latest creation, AlphaZero, detailed in a new paper in Science, was built from the bottom up to be game-agnostic.

All it was given was the rules of each game, and it then played itself thousands of times, effectively using trial and error to work out the best tactics for each game. It was then pitted against the most powerful specialized AI for each game, including its predecessor AlphaGo, beating them comprehensively.

“This work has, in effect, closed a multi-decade chapter in AI researchers need to look to a new generation of games to provide the next set of challenges, ”IBM computer scientist Murray Campbell, who has worked on chess-playing computers, wrote in an opinion for Science.

After watching Spike Jonze’s epic sci-fi film Her, I felt as if my mind was, metaphorically of course, absolutely blown away. The film far exceeded my expectations of how it would make me feel, let alone make me think! I found myself wanting to tell everyone I knew to stop what they were doing and take the time to really watch it, listen to it, and absorb it. I spoke of other great films that captured both my heart and mind, like Robot and Frank, but no film has ever really achieved what Spike Jonze’s Her achieves.

A review of Spike Jonze’s 2013 sci-fi film.

After building AlphaGo to beat the world’s best Go players, Google DeepMind built AlphaZero to take on the world’s best machine players.

DeepMind’s artificial intelligence programme AlphaZero is now showing signs of human-like intuition and creativity, in what developers have hailed as ‘turning point’ in history.

The computer system amazed the world last year when it mastered the game of chess from scratch within just four hours, despite not being programmed how to win.

But now, after a year of testing and analysis by chess grandmasters, the machine has developed a new style of play unlike anything ever seen before, suggesting the programme is now improvising like a human.

Continue reading “DeepMind’s AlphaZero now showing human-like intuition in historical ‘turning point’ for AI” »

• Tencent Music on Monday set the price for its US initial public offering after global markets got a boost from a truce in the US-and-China trade war.
• The company said American Depository Receipts will price between $13 and $15, helping it raise as much as $1.2 billion.
• The IPO was initially scheduled for October 18, but was postponed due to stock-market volatility.
• Monday’s filing comes after President Donald Trump agreed to postpone new tariffs on Chinese imports by 90 days and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to buy a substantial amount of US goods and name Fentanyl a controlled substance.

Tencent Music Entertainment filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday to set the price for its US initial public offering — one day after President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a truce in the trade war between the US and China.

The China-based streaming-music service backed by tech giant Tencent said the offering price will be in the range of $13 and $15 per American Depository Receipt, helping it raise as much as $1.2 billion.

I want to play!

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Game: facebook.com/beatsaber

A first for video games.

PlayStation users will now see an extra 9 percent tax applied to some purchases on the platform.

Sony has agreed to comply with Chicago’s amusement tax, leaving PlayStation users to face an extra 9 percent tax on streaming and rental services, effective Nov. 14. This latest expansion of the city’s amusement tax will apply to purchases such as rentals, but not full sales of games.

The city’s amusement tax used to mostly apply to purchases of concert and sporting event tickets. However, the Chicago Department of Finance ruled in 2015 that the tax covered streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Spotify. This expansion of the amusement tax is commonly dubbed the “Netflix tax” or the “cloud tax.” In addition to being regressive, it is also likely illegal.

Continue reading “Chicago slaps PlayStation users with expansion of 9 percent amusement tax” »