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- Nvidia’s AI recreates Pac-Man from scratch just by watching it being played - The Verge
- Facebook Messenger Gets Scam Warnings to Help Users Avoid Potentially Harmful Interactions - Gadgets 360
- Killer deals: Pixel 3a and 3a XL are down to $279 and $319 (up to $160 off) - Android Police
| Nvidia’s AI recreates Pac-Man from scratch just by watching it being played - The Verge Posted: 22 May 2020 06:16 AM PDT Nvidia is best known for its graphics cards, but the company conducts some serious research into artificial intelligence, too. For its latest project, Nvidia researchers taught an AI system to recreate the game of Pac-Man simply by watching it being played. There's no coding involved, no pre-rendered images for the software to draw on. The AI model is simply fed visual data of the game in action along with the accompanying controller inputs and then recreates it frame by frame from this information. The resulting game is playable by humans, and Nvidia says it will be releasing it online in the near future. The AI version is by no means a perfect facsimile, though. The imagery is blurry and it doesn't seem like the AI managed to capture the exact behavior of the game's ghosts, each of which is programmed with a specific personality that dictates its movement. But the basic dynamics of Pac-Man are all there: eat pellets, avoid ghosts, and try not to die. "It learns all of these things just by watching," Nvidia's Rev Lebaredian, vice president of simulation technology, told journalists in a briefing. "[It's] similar to how a human programmer can watch many episodes of Pac-Man on YouTube and infer what the rules of the games are and reconstruct them." Lebaredian said the work had been done in collaboration with Pac-Man's creator, Bandai Namco, which is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the arcade classic today. :format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19991861/Screen_Shot_2020_05_21_at_5.06.29_PM.png) Nvidia says work like this shows how artificial intelligence will be used for game design in the future. Developers can input their work into the AI and use it to create variations or maybe design new levels. "You could use this to mash different games together," Sanja Fidler, director of Nvidia's Toronto research lab, told journalists, "giving additional power to games developers by [letting them] blend together different games." Creating AI that can learn the rules of a virtual world just by watching it in action also has implications for tasks like programming robots. "Eventually we'd like it to learn the rules of the real world," says Lebaredian. The AI might watch videos of robotics trolleys navigating a warehouse, for example, and use that information to design navigation software of its own. The program that recreated Pac-Man is called GameGAN. GAN stands for generative adversarial network and is a common architecture used in machine learning. The basic principle of a GAN is that it works in two halves. The first half of the GAN tries to replicate the input data, while the second half compares this to the original source. If they don't match, the generated data is rejected and the generator tweaks its work and resubmits it. :format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19991865/BMW_STR_Isaac_Sim.png) Using AI to generate virtual worlds like video games has been done before. But Nvidia's researchers introduced several new aspects, including a "memory module" that allowed the system to store an internal map of the game world. This leads to greater consistency in the game world, a key characteristic when recreating the mazes of Pac-Man. They also allow for the static elements of the game world (like the maze) to be separated from the dynamic ones (like the ghosts), which suits the company's goal of using AI to generate new levels. David Ha, an AI researcher at Google who's worked on similar tasks, told The Verge that the research was "very interesting." Earlier teams have tried to recreate game worlds using GANs, said Ha, "but from what I know, [this] is the first to demonstrate good results." "All in all, a very exciting paper, and I look forward to see more developments using this approach," said Ha. Some elements of the process definitely need tweaking, though, and demonstrate the particular fragility of artificial intelligence when learning new tasks. Fidler told journalists that to recreate Pac-Man, GameGAN had to be trained on some 50,000 episodes. Getting that gameplay data from humans wasn't feasible, so the team used an AI agent to generate the data. Unfortunately, the AI agent was so good at the game that it hardly ever died. "That made it hard for the AI trying to recreate the game to learn the concept of dying," says Fidler. Instead, in early versions of the AI-generated Pac-Man, GameGAN tweaked the game so that ghosts never actually reached the title character but trail directly behind it like baby ducks following a parent. "It's a funny effect of the way we trained it," says Fidler. |
| Posted: 21 May 2020 06:48 AM PDT Facebook on Thursday said that its Messenger app will be watching behind the scenes for scammers using the smartphone communication system. Safety notices will pop up in Messenger text chats if activity taking place in the background is deemed suspicious by artificial intelligence software, according to director of privacy and safety product management Jay Sullivan. He said the new safety feature "will help millions of people avoid potentially harmful interactions and possible scams without compromising their privacy."
The feature began rolling out to the Messenger app tailored for Android-powered smartphones in March and will head to Messenger on iPhones next week, according to Facebook. "Too often people interact with someone online they think they know or trust, when it's really a scammer or imposter," Sullivan said. "These accounts can be hard to identify at first and the results can be costly." Artificial intelligence software scans for scammers based on account behaviour, such as sending messages in bulk targeting demographics or geographies, according to Facebook. Warning notices pop up before people respond to messages of possibly dubious origins. Since the feature does not involve looking at what is in messages, it should continue to add a layer of safety when Messenger takes to encrypted missives as planned by Facebook.
Photo Credit: Facebook "As we move to end-to-end encryption, we are investing in privacy-preserving tools like this to keep people safe without accessing message content," Sullivan said. Messenger already uses software tools to fight spam and thwart efforts by adults to contact minors they don't appear to know. Messenger has been ramping up capabilities and security as use of online tools to communicate and socialise surges due to restrictions of movement during the pandemic. Facebook recently unveiled a new video chat service with virtual "rooms" where people can pop in to visit friends, aiming at users turning to the popular Zoom platform during the pandemic. Is Redmi Note 9 Pro Max the best affordable camera phone in India? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Killer deals: Pixel 3a and 3a XL are down to $279 and $319 (up to $160 off) - Android Police Posted: 22 May 2020 04:27 AM PDT  Rumors of this year's Pixel 4a abound, but the device's release date is still up for question. In the meantime, the 2019 Pixel 3a is still sitting tight in a quickly emptying field of decent midrange phones with excellent cameras. When it launched, it was a tremendous value at $399 and even gained our smartphone of the year award, but discounts have made its appeal even more undeniable. Today, it has dropped to its lowest ever price: $279 for the 3a and $319 for the 3aXL. Sure, the 3a isn't the hottest midrange device anymore, but it packs a punch in its affordable price: a camera in the same league as the regular Pixel 3, a fast and clean Android experience, and the promise of fast updates. You can even install the latest Android 11 Developer Previews on it to test the latest version of the OS. Plus, it doesn't skimp too much on the specs thanks to a Snapdragon 670, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, USB-C PD, NFC, Bluetooth 5.0, and conveniences like a 3.5mm headphone jack and a fingerprint sensor. The 3a and 3a are discounted at several online retailers and in three color variants (white, black, and purple'ish). Only Abt mentions the end of the discount period as 06/27, so you only have a few days to make up your mind. We've collected the links for you below:
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