Posts by FSM

Time for AI to conquer Fidget Spinner Simulator and other appalling asset flips!

(I admit I assumed FSS is a Unity game because it's an asset flip, but I'm not 100% sure about that.)

Typo?

"Last year, he proved that eels could jump [start a car!]"

"A Microsoft spokesperson told us the Windows giant has nothing to say."

That's a contradiction.

Required?

I imagine the bots in SC2 are insanely strong already, if Blizzard's other game Warcraft 3 is anything to go by. (Yes, I get rekt by easy bots in that game... The bots in C&C Red Alert 2 and Generals are easy as hell in contrast.)

Interesting, but also not

AI in continuous games isn't particularly impressive as it comes down to reaction times, and in that respect AI will always have the upper hand. It's a completely different type of game compared to Go, a turn-based game, where latency isn't crucial.

This proof-of-concept match has very stringent rules, such as both human and AI being able to play only one hero, and other environmental boosters ("runes") not being permitted. It's a million miles from the actual game of Dota 2, which is a 5 vs 5 astronomically more complex game.

There are very few details on how this bot works. We don't know if the AI is receiving the screen data as input, or if it's getting easily-parseable representations of the world. These are two massively different things for several reasons; a big one, IMO, is recognising animations. Vengeful Spirit (not the hero the AI is using in this case) is the most extreme example I can think of as all of her animations look *very* similar; one of which is a very powerful, fast-moving stun. If it's her stun, you have very little time to recognise it, both from sight and sound cues.

If the AI is "seeing" these animations as events in an easy-to-parse world representation, then the bot can surely instantly recognise that it is about to be stunned and take action much quicker than a human ever could. That being said, all ability casts can be cancelled a certain way through, so the bot could potentially be duped into a loop of thinking it's going to be stunned and then not. This adds some more interesting potential for the bot to recognise whether it's beneficial for the enemy to stun the bot, so it knows whether to actually bother reacting. But Dota 2 is an imperfect information game, so it sounds complex.

Anyway, I felt I had to rant about this. It's interesting, yes, but I don't think it makes any difference to everyday Dota 2. If you want to make a strong bot that has the same level of skill as a human then clearly it will need delays adding to its decisions, or perhaps it would have to make occasional deliberate mistakes. But otherwise, it's just Elon Musk's company waving their "deep learning" dongs around, showing that they've done it first.

If someone else took his proof-of-concept code and used it to create malware, that makes him no more of a malware writer than anyone who's ever posted code on a blog, or in an answer on StackOverflow.

You know that feeling

... when you're not sure if you've woken up yet?

Eric King, the Deputy Director, criticised the "underhand and undemocratic manner in which the Government is seeking to make lawful GCHQ's hacking operations."

He then went on to say, "SURPRISE MOTHERF**KER"

C'mon M$

Run it through Valgrind!

"Smarter polymorphs and the like"

They don't steal your emotions, they take your intelligence.

Or I guess that's technology in general.

Rational?

Is this just nations being paranoid, or do they really pose a serious security threat, due to close ties with the Chinese gov or something?

APU

I wish they'd cut out the 'it must have a cool name' bullshit and just call it a Heterogeneous Processing Unit. Sounds good and is based on fact.

Very encouraging news nonetheless.

WTF radiation?

Could someone please explain to me why black holes can emit radiation, given that their most interesting feature is that light can't escape from them?

Hackers these days...

I cannot take anyone seriously who chooses l33tspeak names like "evad3rs" and "evasi0n". That means "pre-pubescent teenagers" to me.

How bad can it be?

"Over 3 per cent of Facebook's CPU time is spent on sorting out privacy, Zuckerberg says."

I lol'd. Not sure if that's a lot or not.

So they may as well have copied and pasted the details from the website. I would laugh but I'm on a train.

How bad can it be?

I'm afraid I'm not an expert with privacy. Can someone please explain what data they collect from you using maps exactly? Also, I use an Android phone, but I have location services disabled. What data can google collect about Android users?

What about {K,X}ubuntu?

I recently got Xubuntu to replace my terrible GNOME 3 Fedora 17. Presumably, if you don't pick the Unity ubuntu, you're safe?

Ulterior motives

I've got a theory that the dance is actually a mind control ritual. Recently, Psy's been teaching it to the world's public populations, but more scarily, politicians who should have nothing to do with 'music' (like Ban Ki-moon! WTF is going on there...) and so he has more and more of a grip on the world, and will eventually invoke the apocalypse. I think you know what day it will be...

Story time over.

150000 * 0 = ?

I'm not sure I've ever seen a sheep move. Maybe it meant to say the speed that the sheep eats at?