Hackers use trojanized game installers to spread the StaryDobry XMRig miner, hijacking gaming PCs with 8+ core CPUs.
Category: entertainment
Introduces the first World and Human Action Model (WHAM). The WHAM, which we’ve named “Muse,” is a generative AI model of a video game that can generate game visuals, controller actions, or both.
Today Nature published Microsoft’s research detailing our WHAM, an AI model that generates video game visuals & controller actions. We are releasing the model weights, sample data, & WHAM Demonstrator on Azure AI Foundry, enabling researchers to build on the work.
There’s an accelerating cat-and-mouse game between web publishers and AI crawlers, and we all stand to lose.
The pioneering scifi film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang in 1927, depicts a dystopian future in 2026 with society sharply divided between wealthy elitists and the working poor. Gustav Fröhlich is Freder, the wealthy son of city ruler who discovers the grim conditions of the workers when he ventures into the city’s depths. After meeting Maria and her robotic double, both played by Brigitte Helm, he becomes determined to bridge the social divide. The story unfolds with dramatic visuals of towering skyscrapers and massive factories. The world of Metropolis is full of technological wonder and social turmoil. The film’s depiction of large-scale automation and robotics aligns with current trends in manufacturing, though fully sentient robots are unlikely to materialize by 2026. #silentfilm #silentfilms #manufacturing #industry40 #metropolis #fritzlang #sciencefiction #scifi #movies #filmanalysis #robotics #robots #industrialautomation …
A group of psychologists and economists at Jaume I University, in Spain, has found evidence that women are more generous than men. In their study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, Iván Barreda-Tarrazona, Ainhoa Jaramillo-Gutiérrez, Marina Pavan, and Gerardo Sabater-Grande conducted experiments with volunteers playing “the Dictator Game.”
Prior research has suggested that men and women are nearly equal regarding financial generosity. But the team noted that virtually all such studies have involved small numbers of volunteer participants. In this new work, the group attempted to learn more about gender-based generosity by recruiting 1,161 volunteers to play the Dictator Game, and used the results to measure generosity.
The Dictator Game is a type of ultimatum game developed by psychologists to determine if people act solely out of self-interest. Players are given a certain amount of money and are asked if they would like to share some or all of it with a second, anonymous player. The second player is at the mercy of the first; they will receive only the amount offered by the first player.
Flock of Meese’s engine is a fully custom-built, Minecraft-inspired engine created to run on older consoles like the Dreamcast, GameCube, and Wii. While it might look just like a Minecraft clone for now, the goal is to replicate the mechanics of Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 and then evolve into an original block-based game that surpasses it in both gameplay and visual fidelity, showcasing the technical capabilities of this engine.
Meese specifically chose the Dreamcast because it’s barely capable enough to run an open-world voxel game. This challenge sparked a lot of creativity in performance optimization, and the result was a major success: despite having only 16 MB of main RAM, Dreamcast already runs Meese’s engine at 30 FPS, while the GameCube port achieves a smooth 60 FPS.
Why would someone build an engine for these old consoles? It seems like a project of passion, similar to how people continue to port DOOM to different devices, testing their programming skills to the limit and exploring just how far classic games can be pushed. Once released, you’ll have the chance to put your 20-year-old consoles to work with this game, or you can choose to play it via a PC port. According to Meese, there will likely be a distinction between the modern PC version and the retro console versions, as he wants the PC to fully take advantage of newer hardware.
A game of chess requires its players to think several moves ahead, a skill that computer programs have mastered over the years. Back in 1996, an IBM supercomputer famously beat the then world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Later, in 2017, an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by Google DeepMind, called AlphaZero, triumphed over the best computerized chess engines of the time after training itself to play the game in a matter of hours.
More recently, some mathematicians have begun to actively pursue the question of whether AI programs can also help in cracking some of the world’s toughest math problems. But, whereas an average game of chess lasts about 30 to 40 moves, these research-level math problems require solutions that take a million or more steps, or moves.
In a paper appearing on the arXiv preprint server, a team led by Caltech’s Sergei Gukov, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, describes developing a new type of machine-learning algorithm that can solve math problems requiring extremely long sequences of steps. The team used their new algorithm to solve families of problems related to an overarching decades-old math problem called the Andrews–Curtis conjecture. In essence, the algorithm can think farther ahead than even advanced programs like AlphaZero.
Movies often reflect the predominant societal and cultural values at the time they were shot. These values can be expressed in various elements of a film, including the interactions between characters, their communication styles and their characterizing traits.
Over the past few decades, some parents and scholars have expressed their concerns about the recent evolution of Hollywood Oscar-nominated and blockbuster movies, suggesting that they contain significantly more abusive and violent content than movies released during earlier historical periods. Yet, these debates are often grounded on a general perception of films as opposed to detailed analyses of films.
Two researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the differences between the content and dialogues of movies released over the past 70 years, using a class of well-known computational models known as large language models (LLMs). Their findings, on the arXiv preprint server, confirm the hypothesis that movies have become more violent over time while also highlighting movie genres that appear to feature the most abusive and violent content.
