GAMING - No Man's Sky

"No Man's Sky is an action-adventure survival video game developed and published by the indie studio Hello Games for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows.  The game was released worldwide in August 2016.

The gameplay of No Man's Sky is built on four pillars: exploration, survival, combat, and trading.  Players are free to perform within the entirety of a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion (1.8×1019) planets, many with their own sets of flora and fauna." - Wikipedia

The above is an understatement.  It is also an open universe and open world.  It also plays somewhat real time, like how long it takes you to fly to a planet even with your 'Pulse Engine' aka Hyperdrive (as-in Star Trek).  Also, as you approach a planet you encounter asteroids that have to be avoided or destroyed with ship weapons.  Then there's the enemy starships.

They just released Pathfinder Update v1.20:  "The Path Finder update introduces planetary vehicles, Base Sharing, PS4 Pro support, ship/weapon specialization, permadeath mode, and much more.  It shows the path for the future."

Base Sharing:  "Bases can now be shared online, allowing other players to discover and explore your outpost."



The play goes like this:

• You start with your starship crashed on a planet

• You have to repair your starship so you can take off, which means....

• You have to salvage parts, gather minerals and ores, etc, needed to do ship repairs and upgrades to your environmental suit and 'weapon'

All the while avoiding getting killed by the 'natives.'

I am really having fun playing it.

"Google artificial intelligence beats champion at world’s most complicated board game" by Nsikan Akpan, PBS NewsHour 1/27/2016

Excerpt

An artificial intelligence program developed by researchers at Google can beat a human at the board game GO, which some consider to be the most complicated board game in existence.  And this AI program — dubbed AlphaGo — didn’t defeat any ol’ human, but the European Go champion Fan Hui in a tournament last October by five games to nil.  The findings, published today in the journal Nature, represent a major coup for machine learning algorithms.

“In a nutshell, by publishing this work as peer-reviewed research, we at Nature want to stimulate the debate about transparency in artificial intelligence,” senior editor Tanguy Chouard said at a press briefing yesterday.  “And this paper seems like the best occasion for this, as it goes- should I say, right at the heart of the mystery of what intelligence is.”

Known as wéiqí in Chinese and baduk in Korean, GO originated in China over 2,500 years ago.  The board consist of a 19 by 19 grid of intersecting lines.  Two players take turns placing black and white marbles on individual intersection points.  Once place, the stones can’t be moved, but they can be captured by completely surrounding an opponent’s marble.  The ultimate objective is control more than 50 percent of the board, but since the board is so intricate, there are numerous possibilities for moves.

“So Go is probably the most complex game ever devised by man.  It has 10^170 (that's 10 followed by 170 zeros) possible board configurations, which is more than the numbers of atoms in the universe,” said study author and AlphaGo co-developer Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind.