Great PS4 Release for April!: Dragon Age-Inquisition 

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“Inquisition’s characters and world recall the grand gestures of the original Dragon Age, even though the game as a whole is so structurally different to its predecessors. It offers the thrill of discovery and the passion of camaraderie. It features a glee club called The Sing-Quisition, and a dwarf with writer’s block. It establishes connections with its world in big ways and small, with the sight of a titanous temple and the smirk of an Orlesian commander in love. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a wonderful game and a lengthy pilgrimage to a magical world with vital thematic ties to one we already know.” 

#Tech Friday: CleverPet is a games console for your dog 🐩💕

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For dogs, there now is one in the form of CleverPet.

Anyone who has a dog or knows anything about them will know that they love to play. So what better way to keep them entertained while you’re away or busy doing something else than with their very own games console.
Now, I am not talking analogue sticks, shoulder bumpers or face buttons; dogs don’t have opposable thumbs after all.
But, CleverPet is essentially a interactive treat dispenser, with your canine buddy having to hit light-up panels in order to release the tasty snack within.
“A dog with a job is a happy dog,” explained Graham Bloem, Head Trainer. “So when I was first introduced to CleverPet, I learned there was something for these problems: keeping our dogs engaged and busy while we’re not at home.”

CleverPet features several games such as “Catch the Squirrel”, which is a light chasing game that asks your pooch to put a paw on the flashing light in time with the movements.
Or there’s “Pattern Plan”, which supposedly challenges them to learn increasingly complicated patterns.
Another game is “Word Learn”, where you can record your voice saying “left” and your dog will have to press the left pad – just for example.
There’s also an accompanying app that lets you view live updates, schedule when CleverPet turns on or off and track how many treats your dog is gobbling up.-KS 

 

Google Creates AI To Master The Ancient Game of Go 🙇🏻

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Go is an ancient Chinese board game dating back over 2,500 years. It is a simple to learn strategy board game played on a 19×19 grid where players take turns placing a black or white stone down. If you surround all of the opponent’s stones in a group then you capture them and remove them from the board. The end goal is to control a majority of the board to win. With the rules as simple as they are the game is almost infinitely complex. The total number of possible positions for the board would be:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
That is 171 zeros if you were curious, and also is a higher number than the amount of atoms in the universe. There are so many more outcomes when compared to chess as well; if chess is considered a battle I would consider Go to be a war.
Due to the complexity of the game and vast number of possible positions it has always been difficult for AI to take on human players. Although chess, checkers, and other games have been cracked by artificial intelligence, the game Go was still eluding the best programmers out there. Google has finally made a breakthrough with AlphaGo. AlphaGo has now made AI a formidable opponent for even professional Go players. Google went into some detail about what sets their Go AI apart from the other go AI out there.
Traditional AI methods—which construct a search tree over all possible positions—don’t have a chance in Go. So when we set out to crack Go, we took a different approach. We built a system, AlphaGo, that combines an advanced tree search with deep neural networks. These neural networks take a description of the Go board as an input and process it through 12 different network layers containing millions of neuron-like connections. One neural network, the “policy network,” selects the next move to play. The other neural network, the “value network,” predicts the winner of the game.

Google said they trained the neural network on 30 million moves from human players until the AI was able to predict the next move 57 percent of the time; 13 percent higher than the previous Go AI record. Because they wanted AlphaGo to excel at beating players, not just mimicking them, they had the AI play thousands of games between its neural networks to better learn how to play. Once that step was complete they had to put AlphaGo to the test. First, they held a tournament against the other top Go AI programs. AlphaGo came out of the 500 game tournament with 499 wins. Now it was time for the hard part — playing against a highly skilled human opponent. Google invited the European Go champion, Fan Hui, to their London office to challenge their new AlphaGo AI. They played 5 matches and AlphaGo won all of them. This was the first time that a computer program has ever beaten a professional Go player. Next on the AlphaGo bucket list is to play a five game challenge match against Lee Sedol in March who has been regarded as the top Go player in the world for the last 10 years.
With this breakthrough in artificial intelligence it will be interesting to see where Google goes next with their neural network learning system. All this news about Go is making me want to get back into playing it. I haven’t played much since the only person I used to play with moved back to Japan.Have you ever played a good ol game of Go?!?!  *smiling*-KS
   

Beyond the Destiny 👾

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I was the little girl that was first on the block with a Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Dreamcast, XBOX, XBOX 360…so you can safely say that I am a genuine gamer girl…at heart anyway now that I’m an adult *smiles*. 

Imagine my delight when I came across news of this new sci fi game “Beyond the Destiny”. A new MMO shooter game on the 3D Unity system. It’s a multiplayer, online play capability, and has an open game universe. That means…no gaming experience will be exactly the same!! (You build your gaming world darlings!!😉) Play alone or create teams!!

More about that sci fi setting???😊

The fantasy world is based on the probable development of current world technology, without the intervention of a supernatural alien influence on Earth’s history. 

It’s a virtual experience like no other! Survival, modifying landscapes and climates. All the alien worlds, where you have to travel to, have unique physical and natural features. Using the latest technology, modify the planet’s landscape and climate any way you’d like. Your success depends on your ability to adapt to the environment.

My favorite part of gaming was always building “my world” in active game play. This game allows you to do so as well!! Create your own city, build factories and farms to start up a production supply, invite players to join you, seize new land. Your buildings will provide you with protection from the adverse effect of exposure to the environment and enemy aggression, the ability to build and repair equipment, mine and process resources, design and launch mass production, trade and much more. Make your city the center of the universe.

If this game can live up to the hype, it should be a huge seller!! And it just may revolutionize your at home gaming!!-KS