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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Will You Start Your Kids on Classic Games or Newer Games? (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An article at The Verge got me thinking. Parents and those of you who plan to become parents: will you introduce your kids to the games you played when you were younger? Those of us who grew up playing Pong, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man have had a chance to see gaming software evolve into the enormously complex and graphically realistic beast it is today. I've begun to understand why my grandparents tried to get me to watch old movies. I'm also curious how you folks plan to teach your kids about computers and software in general. When teaching them Linux, do you just download the latest stable Mint or Ubuntu release and let them take it from there? Do you track down a 20-year-old version of Slackware and show them how things used to be? I can see how there would be value in that.. the UIs we use every day have been abstracted so far away from their roots that we can't always expect new users to intuitively grasp the chain of logic. How do you think this should be handled?

Submission + - Neural Net Learns Breakout By Watching The Game On Screen--Then Thrashes Humans (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: A curious thing about video games is that computers have never been very good at playing them like humans--by looking at a monitor and judging actions accordingly using. Sure, they're pretty good if they have direct access to the program itself but "hand-to-eye-co-ordination" has never been their thing. But now our superiority in this area is coming to an end. A team of AI specialists in London have created a neural network that learns to play games simply by looking at the RGB output from the console. And they've tested it successfully on a number of games from the legendary Atari 2600 system from the 1980s. The method is relatively straightforward. To simplify the visual part of the problem, the system down-samples the Atari's 128-colour, 210x160 pixel image to create an 84x84 grayscale version. Then it simply practices repeatedly to learn what to do. That's time consuming but fairly simple since at any instant in time during a game, a player can choose from a finite set actions that the game allows: move to the left, move to the right, fire and so on. So the task for any player—human or otherwise—is to choose an action at each point in the game that maximises the eventual score. The researchers say that after learning Atari classics such as Breakout and Pong, the neural net can then thrash expert human players. However, the neural net still struggles to match average human performance in games such as Seaquest, Q*bert and, most important of all, Space Invaders. So there's hope for us yet...just not for very much longer.
GUI

When PC Ports of Console Games Go Wrong 398

Posted by Soulskill from the in-other-words-always dept.
A post up at Gamasutra complains about the lack of effort put into the PC ports of some console games. The author picks on the unimpressively-reviewed Ninja Blade in particular: "Just as a quick guide to what we're dealing with here: when you create a new save file at the start of Ninja Blade on the PC, it warns you not to 'turn off your console.' Yes, Ninja Blade is one of those conversions: not so much converted as made to perfunctorily run on a different machine. In-game, you're asked to press A, B, X and Y in various sequences as part of Ninja Blade's extraordinary abundance of quick-time events. Whether you have an Xbox 360 pad plugged in or not, the game captions these button icons with text describing the PC equivalent controls. Only it doesn't always do that. Sometimes, you're left staring at a giant, pulsating, green letter A, and no idea what to do with it." What awful ports have you had the misfortune to experience?

Comment I'm not missing out. (Score 1) 396

by bobsacks (#30936440) Attached to: Does Personalized News Lead To Ignorance?
I'd say it can lead to ignorance of certain events. I get the vast majority of my news from my RSS feeds from sites that have stuff on them that I care about. I will occasionally miss out on really important things like celebrity gossip or some random white girl killed in some random place. But you know what? I am ok with that. Those things do not affect my life in any way and I could care less if I hear about them.

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