A.I. Has Changed Poker, and Maybe Killed Its ‘Soul’
Some of the top poker players today make moves that would have been seen as foolish even 15 years ago. Back then, they would been seen as "fish," or weak players, and invited to games every night. Today, those unorthodox moves are a good sign that the player has adopted strategies from artificial intelligence, which has revolutionized the game, writes Keith Romer in the New York Times Magazine. In fact, "conquered" is the word used in the headline of the in-depth look at the changes. Players now have access to computer programs such as PioSOLVER, which run through the nearly innumerable possible outcomes of a particular hand in a particular game and suggest the strategy—when to bluff or check, how much to raise and when, etc.—that is most likely to pay off over time. The answers are sometimes surprising to traditional players, but the algorithms don't lie.
Players can't use such tools during an in-person tournament, of course—online games are another story—but they can replay hands on the computer afterward to see whether they did the right thing. ...
Piotrek Lopusiewicz, the programmer behind PioSOLVER, counters by arguing that the new generation of A.I. tools is merely a continuation of a longer pattern of technological innovation in poker. Before the advent of solvers, top online players like Polk used software to collect data about their opponents’ past play and analyze it for potential weaknesses. “So now someone brought a bigger firearm to the arms race,” Lopusiewicz says, “and suddenly those guys who weren’t in a position to profit were like: ‘Oh, yeah, but we don’t really mean that arms race. We just want our tools, not the better tools.’”
Besides, for Lopusiewicz, solvers haven’t so much changed poker as revealed its essence. ...
See the full story here: https://www.newser.com/story/315904/ai-has-changed-poker-and-maybe-killed-its-soul.html
Local virtual reality game putting New Zealand on the world stage
Auckland video game studio Method has created a virtual reality game in which players walk on the moon, visit ancient Mayan temples, and fend off crocodiles with a baseball bat.
When the game, called Wanderer is released next Friday on the Sony PlayStation VR, it will be the first virtual reality game made in New Zealand to be released by major console maker.
In the game you play as Asher Newman, an unwitting hero thrust into a time-bending journey to change the course of history and prevent the collapse of civilisation. ...
The game has been in the works since early 2014 when Ramlu and her team became excited by the prospect of using virtual reality technology in gaming. ...
See the full story here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/127521643/local-virtual-reality-game-putting-new-zealand-on-the-world-stage
Rahul Sood’s Irreverent Labs unveils MechaFight Club NFT game
MechaFightClub’s chickens are mechabots with nonfungible tokens (NFTs), which use blockchain to verify the uniqueness of each chicken. The title is a “play-to-earn” game, where players can own the characters that they buy and profit from them if they can resell them to someone else once they’re leveled up.
The game is set in a dystopian future dominated by extraterrestrial mechabots. When a global resistance hacks the 41,000 remaining chicken-shaped mechabots, these weapons of war are redistributed to the public as “weapons of mass entertainment.” ...
It takes place in 2065, after extraterrestrials make their first contact with Earthy. They deemed humanity finally worthy of joining the interstellar races of the galaxy. And then the aliens realized they seriously overestimated humanity. They left, and abandoned Earth. But they left behind some technology for the humans to figure out. ...
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/20/rahul-soods-irreverent-labs-unveils-mechafight-club-nft-game/
Augmented Reality Theater Takes a Bow. In Your Kitchen.
The success of digital-only theater productions has been one of the pandemic’s surprise silver linings: Audiences have been willing to try them and theater companies have found fans thousands of miles away. But could immersive technologies provide a more intriguing path forward for drama, one that will endure once Covid-19 (hopefully) subsides? Augmented reality (A.R.) and virtual reality (V.R.) are already changing gaming, music and art; might theater be next? ...
In 2016, he set up the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio, which operates as a kind of “start-up” within the company, he said in a recent interview at the studio’s modest space, which was crowded with a jumble of technical equipment. The team’s brief is to see how live theater and new technologies can interact and intersect. ...
So how long until we’re watching Ibsen or Shakespeare in augmented reality at our kitchen tables? Coffey laughed, then cautioned that designing successful A.R. performances was still an emerging skill. “But some day it’ll happen, I have no doubt,” he said.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/theater/national-theater-immersive-storytelling-studio-all-kinds-of-limbo.html
Digital mapmaking innovations are revolutionizing travel
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The great indoors
While radio waves are helpful, the biggest advances in indoor navigation may come from visible light. Smart phones will use their cameras and machine learning to interpret scenes, essentially becoming a substitute for the human eye and brain.
Google has already implemented just such a system with its “Live View” feature, which is available in the Zurich, Switzerland airport, some Japanese malls, and Australian transit stations. ...
Under the sea
Even with these advances, one major navigation dead zone remains: anything that’s under the surface of deep water. ...
Bivol’s company has come up with a small-scale solution to that problem. The DiveNET GPS system (which costs between $5,000 and $15,000) includes four buoys that, when deployed by a dive boat, commutate with GPS satellites to locate themselves, and then use sonar to track divers within about a one-mile range. The divers wear receivers that show them, in real time, where the other members of their group are, where the dive boat is, and points of interest on the ocean floor. “In the future, you might even have an underwater drone videotape your dive for you,” Bivol says.
See the full story here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/digital-mapmaking-innovations-are-revolutionizing-travel?loggedin=true
