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Games

Classifying Players For Unique Game Experiences 167

togelius writes "Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, heaps of data about your playing style is collected at Eidos' servers. Researchers at the Center for Computer Games Research have now mined this data to identify the different types of player behavior (PDF). Using self-organizing neural networks, they classified players as either Veterans, Solvers, Pacifists or Runners. It turns out people play the game for very different reasons and focus on different parts of the game, but almost everyone falls into one of these categories. These neural networks can now quickly determine which of these groups you belong to based on just seeing you play. In the near future, such networks will be used to adapt games like Tomb Raider while they are played (e.g. by removing or adding puzzles and enemies), so you get the game you want."

Comment Re:Android (Score 1) 184

and now that Android runs on MIPS it has potential to control those cute Sony Aibos

By the way, Sony had this whole idea years ago, with their OPEN-R operating system that runs the Aibos and other robots. Believe me, it was terrible, and didn't even have POSIX sockets or threads.
The Internet

Browsing Frugally Without Wasting Bandwidth? 450

forrestm writes "At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra. At my university, I'm charged around 2.5c per megabyte. I rarely download anything big, but I often go through a large amount of bandwidth by simply browsing around. For example, when I play a YouTube video, click a link, and then return to the video, the whole video reloads. When I read some websites, such as BoingBoing.net or Cnet.com, my status bar shows a whole lot of data being transferred through other domains. Some pages seem to send/receive data at certain intervals for the duration of my visit. When I begin to enter a search in Firefox's search bar, a list of suggestions is automatically downloaded. In addition to this, Firefox often requests internet access of its own accord, even though I have automatic updating turned off. All this is costing me! How do I stop unsolicited use of my internet connection? How do I go about not wasting bandwidth like this?"

Comment Get to know the college (Score 1) 991

You really shouldn't be only considering future jobs, but which school you would feel more comfortable at and would better fit your learning.

As a computer science major at a small liberal arts college, I know all my professors by their first name, have classes that range from 4 to 15 students, starting working with a robotics soccer team my freshman year and won the world championship last summer, get to fly to Germany and China for competitions, choose exactly which projects to focus on and work directly with other student in coordinating research and development. I know my experience is not typical.

But there are also drawbacks. The class selection is limited (I will have completed my major and all the courses in the department by the end of junior year), and though this leaves lots of room for student research, if the professors field aren't what you're interested in, it will be difficult to develop your own tasks. There also aren't many other student on campus that are in your field, so you may both be in lack of large number of friends with similar interests and forced to interact with many different types of people, for better or for worse (I enjoy it very much, but miss the nerd-friends I had in high school).

It's definitely a toss-up. I know I made the right choice, and I've enjoyed taking classes outside of my field, as a liberal arts college will cause you to. But I get to focus a lot more on MY education and what I'm interested in studying. My entire senior year will be student research in computer science and non-major classes .

The absolute best thing, though, has been getting involved with RoboCup. I don't think that in a larger tech school we could have 'owned' this project the way we do. I've even had a lot of interaction with graduate departments all over the world: next week we'll be sending our code to Germany to compete remotely, in April driving to Pittsburgh to beat the Carnegie Mellon team to the ground once more, and in July flying to China to via for first with the new robots.

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