Art: The Ritual of Chess, a Decoder of Life
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An artist known for contrasting nature and culture continues to explore visual and behavioral patterns with new videos.
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You don't have to be a gamesman to love the show at the Asia Society. The engrossing display of dice, chess sets and polo mallets is a playground for any eye.
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Martin Puryearâs sculptures, as seen at the Museum of Modern Art, balance between the geometric and the organic with Zen aplomb.
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A breakthrough in computer-assisted mind reading brings us closer to predicting criminality. Should the justice system adapt? Commentary by Jennifer Granick.
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Tycho:  Having played collectible card games since the original printing of Magic - taking my dishwasher's tips across the street to Dragon Tails to secure boosters for the coveted Arabian Nights - seeing Gabriel take up the pastime has warmed (but not thawed) my black heart.  It's always a portion of myself I've bridled in his presence, kept hidden, suppressed may be the word.  To have him take it up so freely makes me wonder which perversion of mine he'll take up next.    When he started talking about his "Firestarter" deck, whose dancing fires were stoked by a mysterious device known as "The Holon Engine," I began to worry.  The dangers of Netdecking are fairly substantial when it comes to friendly play, a corrosive force that turns friendly pick-up games into ostentatious displays of wealth on par with rap videos.  If you're playing in a competitive venue, building on prior art and making loads of precision purchases is probably your only recourse.  But if you're just playing at lunch, let me be clear:  you are consorting with devils.    I took time over the weekend to hit the level cap in Call of Duty 4, and then just to be sure that I understood what was going on I played for several more hours.  I'm not the most skilled player you will encounter, with a roughly equal number of kills and deaths, but I prefer to think of my work in an assassinative context - the removal of key players at key moments.  Please let me have this.  In the absence of the game's deeply integrated progression scheme, Infinity Ward would merely have created one of the best shooters available today.  It would have staunch proponents, and they would be right to praise it.  Is there a substance within cream that can rise to the top of itself?  This substance has been discovered.  As a distillation of the Infantry FPS, this is right down to it.  This is brutal, unrepentant, bathtub fucking hooch.  It is tight and smooth, it is lethal.  Unrelenting in its intensity, your first rounds - indeed, your first few levels - will be spent without the succor of CoD4's rich rewards for continued play.  But you'll see them on the killcam, every time you go down:  this one has increased health, of course that would help.  This one does more damage.  This one, after he's killed, pulls his sidearm and takes a few final shots.  This one's shots retain more of their damage after they pass through a wall.        You earn these for leveling up, with the experience you gain for every kill, for every round.  You also earn experience for Challenges, which are (collectively) "awesome things that you did."  I completed X-Ray challenges last night for killing people behind walls, which dished up bonus XP - this is displayed with exultant audio and video cues at the very moment of success.  Killing while crouched, killing while prone, taking down an enemy helicopter, this is all gravy.  There are challenges specific to your weapon, as well:  for kills and headshots with that firearm, you travel down an upgrade path unique to that weapon that reveals sights, camouflage patterns, and other tools to customize your equipment.    Watching videos of multiplayer play online, you'll get the impression that it looks better than it does.  It looks fantastic, don't get me wrong, but it's not completely photorealistic.  What it does have is an extremely reliable framerate and excellent level design, so that during the experience of play these fantastic visuals are transmuted into something sublime.  Here's what I mean:  if a friend is over, and they are watching you play, they'll be able to detect flaws here and there.  Level geometry isn't especially fanciful, and blown paper or leaves look a little strange.  But for the player, movement is just right, player models are just right, and the environments are right so that moment to moment everything gels.      As I said on Friday, to bring this thing into the house of Halo is pretty ballsy - but it'll carve out its proper due.  On the Playstation 3, what force could stand against it?  I have a high opinion of Haze, but I've never played it - that's based mostly on my gut.  Call of Duty 4 will fall hard on that system, like shrieking artillery.
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Tycho: I just read through one of the conduits of Leipzig gaming news, and was jolted by a piece of news: Xbox Live is going to be moving into classic board games. I don't mean, like, Chutes and Ladders or some shit - though I don't doubt that GrowPot420 would snap that up on day one. No, I mean like Settlers of Catan and Carcassone. Pillars of the tabletop gaming community, so to speak. This is probably the biggest news of that convention for me. Getting people together to play these games, or finding people to play them with at all can be a trying endeavor. This is near Goddamn optimal.(CW)TB
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Some game makers are trying to get players to expand their horizons by reflecting on news events in games
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While human chess masters now have silicon overlords, players of Go -- an ancient Chinese game of territory -- are still far ahead of the programmers. The computers are catching up, though, thanks to some tricky innovations. Brendan Borrell talks with computer scientist RÃ©mi Coulom.
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LOS ANGELES  - Art imitates life, and life imitates art, and sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.
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Tian Zhuangzhuangâs biopic is a stately and respectful reflection on the life of Wu Qingyuan, one of the 20th centuryâs top players of go, a Japanese game said to rival chess in complexity.
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This is turning out to be more like a game of snakes and ladders than anything else. Or perhaps an analogy with chess would be better.
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Perhaps Chinook, the checker-playing computer program, should be renamed "King Me." Canadian researchers report they have "solved" checkers, developing a program that cannot lose in a game popular with young and old alike for more than a thousand years.
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Psychologists and neuroscientists have spent several decades producing theoretical models of the mental processes and neural networks that might  be involved in the kaleidoscopic state of psychosis. Largely concerned with simulating the nuts-and-bolts of the mind and brain, these  computer models generate results that tend only to be of interest to researchers and their scientific colleagues. More recently, scientists have decided to harness the power of virtual reality, in an attempt to move beyond the confines of theory, to simulate the experience of psychosis itself.
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Stagers, those who teach the dancers the steps, timing, architecture and intention of a ballet, share their experiences.
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Enigmistica, sudoku, ditloidi e griglie per esercitarsi. L'Officina Bartezzaghi per sciogliere la lingua. Le sfide del Fantavillage, tutte gratis
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(InfoWorld) - A poker-playing robot may help find the answers to some of the most intractable challenges in the business world, such as optimizing e-commerce and auction applications. Programmers have historically tried to teach computers to play chess, setting up the iconic 1996 match between IBM's Deep Blue computer and human champion Gary Kasparov. But poker provides a better test of artificial intelligence (AI), says Tuomas Sandholm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University: While chess players can see all the game pieces, poker players face many hidden details, like what cards the opponent has been dealt. Sandholm specializes in the correlation between strategic behavior and computational complexity, and runs his own company, CombineNet, which develops algorithms to optimize procurement for companies like H.J. Heinz. He put his latest technology to the test in July when he brought his poker-playing robot, called GS2, to compete in a Boston tournament sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. What's the greatest strength of GS2's technology? About 26 million possibilities exist for poker hands in the second round of a Texas Hold 'Em game -- too many for a computer to analyze: GS2 uses an algorithm that reduces the number of possibilities, to consider just 2,465 strategically similar hands. GS2 has not beaten a top human player yet, but Sandholm continues to refine. "The research problem is how to come up automatically with better and better strategies," Sandholm says. "The computational and combinatorial complexity of solving the game makes this enormously challenging."ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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How Lawrence Weiner transforms text into works of art.