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Classic Games (Games)

Pac-Man's Ghost Behavior Algorithms 194

Posted by Soulskill from the i-hate-the-pink-one dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This article has a very interesting description of the algorithms behind the ghosts in Pac-Man. I had no idea about most of this information, but that's probably because it's difficult to study the ghosts when I die every 30 seconds. Quoting: 'The ghosts are always in one of three possible modes: Chase, Scatter, or Frightened. The "normal" mode with the ghosts pursuing Pac-Man is Chase, and this is the one that they spend most of their time in. While in Chase mode, all of the ghosts use Pac-Man's position as a factor in selecting their target tile, though it is more significant to some ghosts than others. In Scatter mode, each ghost has a fixed target tile, each of which is located just outside a different corner of the maze. This causes the four ghosts to disperse to the corners whenever they are in this mode. Frightened mode is unique because the ghosts do not have a specific target tile while in this mode. Instead, they pseudorandomly decide which turns to make at every intersection.'"
Crime

Student Googles Himself, Finds He's Accused of Murder 184

Posted by samzenpus from the be-careful-what-you-search-for dept.
University of Florida student Zachary Garcia was more than a little surprised to find out he was wanted for murder after Googling his name. It turns out the police were looking for a different man but had mistakenly used Garcia's photo. From the article: "Investigators originally released a driver's license photo of Zachary Garcia — spelled with an 'A' — but it was Zachery Garcia — spelled with an 'E'— who was charged in connection with the crime."
Google

Google Engineer Sponsors New Kinect Bounties 96

Posted by Soulskill from the dead-or-alive dept.
ashidosan writes "Hot on the heels of the Adafruit competition, Matt Cutts (a search spam engineer at Google) is sponsoring two more $1,000 bounties for projects using Kinect. 'The first $1,000 prize goes to the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect. The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.'" Relatedly, reader imamac points out a video showing Kinect operating on OS X.
Supercomputing

Homebrew Cray-1 140

Posted by CmdrTaco from the when-i-was-a-child dept.
egil writes "Chris Fenton built his own fully functional 1/10 scale Cray-1 supercomputer. True to the original, it includes the couch-seat, but is also binary compatible with the original. Instead of the power-hungry ECL technology, however, the scale model is built around a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. All software is available if you want to build one for your own living room. The largest obstacle in the project is to find original software."

Comment Re:Webcam - yes! (Score 1) 385

by Zoidmann (#14137657) Attached to: KDE 3.5 Released
Kopete webcam support is nothing new

But it's a new thing it's included as standard - I have read about versions of Kopete that should work with webcams before, just never the "official" branch. (You have to love OSS sometimes).

www.mercury.to the java based messenger (admittadly for MSN only)

Hm, I just read on their page that they will start supporting Jabber as well... still, I like using Kopete, so it's very unlikely I will change to another IM, unless they start getting broken protocols so chatting becomes impossible with users on MSN. But hey, sometimes it does break for some days after "upgrades" by Microsoft, so I might give this Mercury a try sometime :-)

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