Microsoft’s AI is first to reach a perfect Ms. Pac-Man score

The Verge reports: [edited]

The perfect score for arcade classic Ms. Pac-Man has been achieved. Maluuba — a deep learning team acquired by Microsoft — has created an AI system that’s learned how to reach the game’s maximum point value of 999,900 on Atari 2600, using a unique combination of reinforcement learning with a divide-and-conquer method.

Although AI has conquered a number of retro games, Ms. Pac-Man has remained elusive, due to the game’s lack of predictability. Maluuba tasked out responsibilities to over 150 agents. The team then taught the AI using what they call Hybrid Reward Architecture — a combination of reinforcement learning with a divide-and-conquer method. Individual agents were assigned piecemeal tasks — like finding a specific pellet before working in tandem with other agents to achieve greater goals. Maluuba then designated a top AI agent that took suggestions from the other agents in order to inform decisions on where to move Ms. Pac-Man.

The best results came when individual agents “acted very egotistically” and the top agent focused on what was best for the overall team, taking into account not only how many agents wanted to go in a particular direction, but the importance of that direction. (Example: fewer agents wanting to avoid a ghost took priority over a higher amount of agents wanting to pursue a pellet.) “There’s this nice interplay,” says Harm Van Seijen, a researcher with Maluuba, “between how they have to, on the one hand, cooperate based on the preferences of all the agents, but at the same time each agent cares only about one particular problem. It benefits the whole.”
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Coolar - Solar Powered Refrigeration

Coolar reports: [edited]

The Coolar system uses warm water generated through solar energy. It has no moving parts, hazardous cooling fluids or lubricants.

It employs the following cooling cycle...

1. Evaporation: Part of the water evaporates in the evaporator due to low pressure in the system. The resulting evaporation cooling effect cools the storage compartment.

2. Adsorption: An adsorbent binds the water vapour to its surface and frees up space in the evaporator, allowing more water to evaporate, multiplying the cooling effect.

3. Drying: When the adsorbent’s surface is saturated, cooling temporarily pauses.

4. Condensation: By heating, the adsorbent is dried and vapour is released from its surface. The vapour condenses and flows back into the evaporator.
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Guggenheim publishes art books online

The Guggenheim Museum has made over 200 significant works from its collection available. Enjoy!
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise developing 'The Machine'

Business Insider reports: [edited]

HPE has come a big step closer to launching a computer that it's been talking about, researching, and developing since 2014.

It uses a new kind of memory to be able to store and instantly analyse mind-boggling amounts of data. The current prototype that HPE is showing off today contains 160 terabytes (TB) of memory, enough to store and work with every book in the Library of Congress five times over.

But this new kind of memory can expand far beyond that. HPE expects to be able to build a machine that reaches up to 4,096 yottabytes, enough to hold 250,000 times all the data currently stored in the world. The Machine can crunch through "every digital health record of every person on earth; every piece of data from Facebook; every trip of Google’s autonomous vehicles; and every data set from space exploration all at the same time", HPE CEO Meg Whitman wrote in a blog post.

Not only has the company invented a new kind of memory to build this computer, but the company is breaking from its long-standing partnership with Microsoft and building a new operating system, based on Linux, to run this computer. It is also using ARM chips as the main processor, not Intel chips.
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Jim Kovaleski – Urban Nomadic Gardener

Boing Boing reports: [edited]

Justin Rhodes profiles Jim Kovaleski, an urban market gardener who leases other people's residential yards for planting produce, which he harvests and sells up and down the east coast of the United States.
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Glowee Bioluminescent Light

InnoEnergy reports: [edited]

Glowee develops a lighting system that does not consume any electricity, requires no power supply, and produces very little CO2 or light pollution.

Twenty-five-year-old design graduate Sandra Rey is a woman with a mission. For three years she has had a vision of a world lit by an inexhaustible, living and eco-friendly source of bioluminescence, the phenomenon that enables fireflies to glow and anglerfish to lure their prey. “I want to see a world where bioluminescence is part of everyday life,” says Sandra. Glowee, the company she founded, develops biological systems that reproduce this chemical reaction.

What Glowee makes is a gel made up of (nonpathogenic and nontoxic) bacteria in a nutrient solution in which the microbes thrive. The resulting culture comes in transparent pods of various shapes and sizes that emit a glow until the microorganisms eventually die.

Sandra claims that the product’s entire life cycle equates to half the CO2 emissions of an equivalent LED system. What’s more, the cold, soft light it emits will not disturb urban fauna and the system’s inherent portability makes it suitable for isolated communities and facilities. The product has a host of marketing applications, from shop windows to road signs and street furniture. In the longer term, it may be used in building materials and even in paints.

Originally translated from La Tribune.
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Lyrebird

Lyrebird reports: [edited]

Lyrebird will offer an API to copy the voice of anyone. It will need as little as one minute of audio recording of a speaker to compute a unique key defining her/his voice. This key will then allow to generate anything from its corresponding voice. The API will be robust enough to learn from noisy recordings.

[Ed. Check out the demos, very impressive.]
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Early Macintosh Emulation

Internet Archive Blogs reports: [edited]

The Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse-driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984.

The first set of emulated Macintosh software is located here.
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Shopify launches Burst royalty free image site

TechCrunch reports: [edited]

Shopify’s Burst site offers all its images royalty-free, under the Creative Commons Zero license.

Artists for individual photos are linked, so you can credit them if you want to.
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Extra portion of SpaceX rocket recovered

Reuters reports: [edited]

Shortly after the main section of SpaceX’s first recycled Falcon 9 booster landed itself on a platform in the ocean, half of the rocket’s nosecone, which protected a communications satellite during launch, splashed down via parachute nearby.

Measuring 13 metres long and 5 metres in diameter, the nosecone is big enough to hold a school bus. It separates into two pieces, exposing the satellite, about 4 minutes after liftoff. As a test, SpaceX outfitted the fairing with thrusters and a steerable parachute.

After some debate about whether the nosecone could be recovered, Musk said he told his engineering team, “Imagine you had $6 million in cash on a pallet flying through the air that’s just going to smash into the ocean. Would you try to recover that? Yes, you would.”
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Dell releases 8K monitor

engadget reports: [edited]

Dell's 31.5-inch 8K monitor, the Ultrasharp 32 is available on Dell's online store for initial shipping in mid-April. Assuming you've got a spare $5,000 to spend.

The Ultrasharp 32's 7,680 by 4,320 pixels and 100 percent Adobe RGB and sRGB colour support will benefit artists and photographers that need to view and edit massive files. It has a maximum 33.2MP resolution and 280 PPI density, and you'll need to pipe in the visuals over two DisplayPort 1.3 ports.
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Boiled Egg Topper

If you love boiled eggs, but dislike burning your fingers when cracking the shell, this is an elegant solution.

Place it on the top of a boiled egg, raise the plunger and let it drop. A sharp ridge on the inside of the stainless steel plunger cuts into the egg shell. The top can then be removed with the help of a sharp knife. Marvellous.
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First on-site printed house

Apis Core reports: [edited]

The first house printed using mobile 3D printing technology has been built in Stupino town, Moscow region. Printing of self-bearing walls, partitions and building envelope were done in less than a day. The area of the printed building is 38m². The interior includes a hall, a bathroom, a living room and a compact functional kitchen.

The construction cost of the printed house amounted to $10,134. This cost includes all the works that were done to make a complete house: work and materials for the construction of foundation, roof, exterior and interior finishing works, installation of heat insulation of walls, windows, floors and ceilings.

As the printer prints self-bearing walls and partitions, it saves up to 70% compared to traditional construction techniques.
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AirSelfie

AirSelfie reports: [edited]

AirSelfie is a pocket-size flying camera that connects with your smartphone to let you take HD photos of you, your friends, and your life from the sky. Its propellers can carry it up to 20 meters in the air, letting you capture photos and videos on your device.

The anti-vibration shock absorber and 5 MP camera ensure high quality images. And its 61g form slips into a special phone cover and charger (available for iPhone 6/6S, iPhone 7/7 Plus, Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, Huawei P9 and Google Pixel).

Available to pre-order: £229.00
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Boston Dynamics' Handle

Boston Dynamics reports: [edited]

Handle is a research robot that stands 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4​ ​feet vertically. ​It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge.

​​​Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles​ found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere.
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Svalbarði Polar Iceberg Water

Business Insider reports: [edited]

Harrods has a new product on its shelves: a bottle of 'luxury water' retailing at £80, harvested from icebergs in the Arctic Ocean.

The brand's founder, Norwegian-American businessman Jamal Qureshi founded the brand after collecting melt water from the Norwegian territory of Svalbard in 2013 as a gift for his wife. "Four years later," the company said in a statement, "the whimsical, selfless thought has transformed into an epicurean product, which is redefining the very notion of drinking water."

Qureshi collects batches of the water by chartering an icebreaker with the permission of the Governor of Svalbard and travelling to the icebergs of Kongsfjorden, which is 1,000km from the North Pole. Once 15 tonnes of ice is gathered, it is melted and bottled by hand in order to "capture the water in its purest form."

The brand says that the water has "an exceptionally light mouthfeel with a unique terroir – the taste of snow in air and evokes recollections of snowflakes on the tongue".
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Creative Commons Updates Its Image Search Engine

TechCrunch reports: [edited]

The engine pulls in photos from Flickr, 500px, Rijksmuseum, the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as its initial sources.

In addition to having a more modern look-and-feel, the new CC Search lets you narrow searches by license type, title, creator, tags, collection and type of institution. It also includes social features, letting you make and share lists of favourite images, as well as add tags and favorites to individual items.

You can save your searches for quick access in the future and the engine also makes it easier to apply the necessary attribution, when available, by offering pre-formatted copy you can click to copy and paste.

The beta search engine is available here.
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London - Somerset - London, 11 & 12-02-17

London - Somerset 11-02-17
Music to Watch Girls By - Andy Williams
Rockit - Herbie Hancock
Heart Of Glass - Blondie
I'm Your Man - Wham!
What's Love Got to Do With It - Tina Turner
Just Lose It - Eminem
Each Time You Break My Heart - Nick Kamen
The Gambler - Kenny Rogers
Lean on Me (Ah-li-ayo) - Red Box
99 Red Balloons - Nena
You Make My Dreams (Remastered) - Daryl Hall & John Oates
The Reflex - Duran Duran
Mo Money Mo Problems (feat. Mase & Puff Daddy) - The Notorious B.I.G.
Build Me Up Buttercup - Foundations
i - Kendrick Lamar
Howzat - Sherbet
Maggie May - Rod Stewart
How Will I Know - Whitney Houston
Victim of Love - Erasure
Pharaohs (feat. Roses Gabor) - SBTRKT
Seasons (Waiting On You) - Future Islands
(TSOB) The Sound Of Philadelphia - MFSB
Us - Regina Spektor
C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L (Edit) - The Chemical Brothers
She Taught Me to Yodel - Frank Ifield
Beat It - Michael Jackson
Your Love Is My Drug - Ke$ha
Maneater - Daryl Hall & John Oates
The Blow Up - Blackalicious
Bat Out Of Hell - Meat Loaf
I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor
I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor - Arctic Monkeys
History - Mai Tai
You Got It - Roy Orbison
Candyman - Christina Aguilera
Walk On The Wild Side - Lou Reed
I Beg Your Pardon - Kon Kan
All Right Now - Free
Dance Yourself Dizzy (7 Inch) - Liquid Gold
F*k Yeah Ace of Hearts - XXXChange
Fill My Little World - The Feeling
Wannabe - Spice Girls
Grace Kelly - MIKA
Cheesecake - Louis Armstrong
Listen to Your Heart - Roxette
Waiting for a Star to Fall - Boy Meets Girl
Pass Out - Tinie Tempah
Cheap Thrills - Sia feat. Sean Paul
Baba O'Riley - The Who
The Sound - The 1975
Spinning Around - Kylie Minogue
Up Town Top Ranking - Althea And Donna
She Drives Me Crazy - Fine Young Cannibals

Somerset to London 12-02-17
Fireflies (UK Radio Edit) - Owl City
Tonight's The Kind Of Night - Noah and the Whale
Give me some kind of sign girl - Brenton Wood
Barbra Streisand (UK Radio Edit) - Duck Sauce
Where the Light Gets In - Primal Scream
I Drove All Night - Cyndi Lauper
Teenage Kicks - The Undertones
Wow - Beck
Rockabye (feat. Sean Paul & Anne-Marie) - Clean Bandit
Jolene - Dolly Parton
The Boys Are Back In Town - Thin Lizzy
Don't Think I'm Not - Kandi
The Love I Lost (Single Version) - Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes & arranged by Bobby Martin
Rest of My Life (feat. Usher & David Guetta) - Ludacris
September - Earth, Wind & Fire
Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) - Beyoncé
Don't Stop Believin' - Journey
My Sharona - The Knack
If I Had A Hammer - Trini Lopez
Life Is A Rollercoaster - Ronan Keating
The Favourite Band of a Dead Man - Man & The Echo
If You Let Me Stay - Terence Trent D'Arby
Babooshka - Kate Bush
Price Tag (feat. B.o.B) - Jessie J
Just Got Lucky - Jo Boxers
Evacuate The Dancefloor - Cascada
Don't Let Me Down (feat. Daya) [Illenium Remix] - The Chainsmokers
Bad Reputation - Avril Lavigne
Rum and coca cola - The Andrews Sisters
Airplanes (feat. Hayley Williams of Paramore) - B.o.B
I Should Have Known Better - Jim Diamond
Does Your Mother Know - ABBA
Bad Girls - M.I.A.
High - The Cure
Umbrella (Seamus Haji & Paul Emanuel Radio Edit) - Rihanna
The Ballroom Blitz - Sweet
Tilted - Christine and the Queens
My Favourite Waste of Time - Owen Paul
Save Your Kisses For Me - Brotherhood Of Man
It's Raining Men - The Weather Girls
Who's That Chick? (feat. Rihanna) - David Guetta & Rihanna
Smarty Pants - First Choice
FloriDada - Animal Collective
110% - Jessie Ware
Moves Like Jagger (feat. Christina Aguilera) - Maroon 5
Le Freak - Chic
Eye of the Tiger - Survivor
You're The First, The Last, My Everything - Barry White
Telephone - Lady GaGa & Beyoncé
Levels - Avicii
You Sexy Thing - Hot Chocolate
How Bad Do You Want It (Oh Yeah) - Sevyn Streeter
Your Drums, Your Love - AlunaGeorge
Stuck In The Middle With You - Stealers Wheel
Move It Like This - Baha Men
Dancing in The Moonlight - Toploader
On the Regular - Shamir
XXXO - M.I.A.
Black Betty - Ram Jam
Titanium (feat. Sia) - David Guetta
Go! (feat. Mai Lan) - M83
Here I Come (Broader Than Broadway) - Barrington Levy
Don't Stop Me Now - Queen
Don't Cha - The Pussycat Dolls
Mr Loverman (feat. Chevelle Franklin) - Shabba Ranks
Alive - Empire of the Sun
Call Me - Spagna
Dilemma - Nelly Feat. Kelly Rowland
Punching In a Dream (Single Version) - The Naked & Famous
Live And Let Die - Paul McCartney & Wings
Moving On Up - M People
Thunder In My Heart Again (Radio Edit) - Meck & Leo Sayer
Home - Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
Don't Deny Your Heart - Hot Chip
5.7.0.5. - City Boy
Lo Sforzo (The Stress) - Ocelot
Total Eclipse of the Heart - Bonnie Tyler
Don't Talk To Him - Cliff Richard & The Shadows
It's My Party - Lesley Gore
Walking Back to Happiness - Helen Shapiro

Image by brook jordan
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AI conquers No Limit Texas Hold 'Em

Wired reports: [edited]

An AI built by two Carnegie Mellon researchers has defeated four top players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em — a particularly complex form of poker that relies heavily on longterm betting strategies and game theory.

Over the past twenty years, machines have topped the best humans at checkers, chess, Scrabble, Jeopardy!, and even the ancient game of Go. But no AI had ever beaten the best at such an extreme game of 'imperfect information', a game where certain elements, such as the cards on the table, are hidden.

Carnegie Mellon professor Tuomas Sandholm and grad student Noam Brown designed the AI, which they call Libratus, Latin for 'balance'. Across 20 days of play, Libratus topped its four human competitors by more than $1.7 million.

According to the human players that lost out to the machine, Libratus is aptly named. It does a little bit of everything well: knowing when to bluff and when to bet low with very good cards, as well as when to change its bets just to thrown off the competition. “It splits its bets into three, four, five different sizes,” says Daniel McAulay, 26, one of the players bested by the machine. “No human has the ability to do that.”
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The origin of ampersand

Medium reports: [edited]

The symbol “&” is an amalgam of the letters 'et', Latin for 'and'. The character is known as an ampersand.

It began with American children learning their ABCs. In the 1830s the alphabet started incorporating the symbol '&' as the 27th letter. Reciting the end of the alphabet would be confusing if it were 'X, Y, Z, and'.

So a couple of words of Latin were incorporated into the chant, 'X, Y, Z, and per se and'.

'Per se' is Latin for 'by itself'. Through routine repetition the phrase 'and per se and' transmogrified into 'ampersand'.

And it stuck.
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