Behind last year’s buzz following the release of the text generator GPT-3 , there was another machine learning headline that gave cause for pause: AI controlled fighter jets had defeated a human piloted fighter jet 5-0 in a Darpa simulation. Looks like today’s fighter pilots may be going the way of the shining medieval knight in armor–obsolete and unsustainable because of catastrophic vulnerabilities on the battle field.
Code
Was this post written by a machine?
The question is not as far fetched as you might think. And — even though this will not settle the matter — let me give you my answer right away: No, this post was not written by a machine. It was written by a real person, a human writer, me. I wrote it. But consider … Read more
Dreamlike indie game Etherborn draws inspiration from Monument Valley – and classic artists of the past
Classic 20th century artists such as Escher, Mondrian and de Chirico have influenced a surreal new platformer from studio Altered Matter.
Indie games have been becoming more dream-like these past few years, ranging from the ethereal classics of Monument Valley and Gris to the Twin Peaks bad-trip of Petscop.
A new name to add to 2019’s roster of anticipated games is Etherborn, as created by Barcelona’s Altered Matter studio and distributed by 20th Century Fox games label FoxNext this spring.
Play Chess with Marcel Duchamp: A Virtual Online Chess Game
A new software program makes it possible to play chess with a virtual Marcel Duchamp. It is basically a chess program with one intriguing feature: the game features an opponent based on Duchamp’s recorded chess matches.
“I’ve come to the personal conclusion that while not all artists are chess players,
all chess players are artists.” Marcel Duchamp
Earlier this year, Colin Marshall told you how “Chess has obsessed many of humanity’s finest minds over centuries and centuries and Marcel Duchamp seems to have shown little resistance to its intellectual and aesthetic pull.”
His passion for the game led Duchamp to design a now iconic Art Deco chess set, to print an array of chess tournament posters, and to become an adept chess player himself, eventually earning the title of “grand master” as a result.
Charting the Geo-History of Culture
Bigger data gets the bigger picture . . . in this case, the big picture in the form of an amazing visualization of global cultural evolution. In Europe. Things move slowly at the beginning, when the only stars and centers of cultural gravity are Athens and Rome. Watch Europe flicker through the “dark” ages until the Renaissance lights up the map. Of course, things really get going in the nineteen hundreds with the industrial revolution.
Reincarnation 2014
Welcome to the latest virtual reincarnation of digitalsouls.com — as a WordPress site.
Reincarnations of digitalsouls.com include its first online appearance as a collection of simple html pages (1997-2000). In 2001, the site saw a new reincarnation as a PHP reactor (2001-3). This virtual reincarnation was followed by a very successful life as a PHP Nuke. During its life as a PHP nuke, digitalsouls.com evolved and grew through multiple versions of that publishing platform (2004-2013). Today, after a rather brief incarnation as a Joomla site (2013-14), digitalsouls.com emerges once more in its latest virtual reincarnation, this time as a WordPress site.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); :GOTO 10
This installment of MIT Press series Software Studies has an unusual title, at least for the non-coding population. It is a single line of BASIC that, if the code is executed, prints an infinite string consisting of two characters, selected at random. The last instruction at the end of the program line (GOTO 10) instructs the computer to go back to the beginning of line 10 of the program, execute its instructions, and generate and print out another character based on the algorithm.
Virtually Van Gogh
“I acknowledge that a man cannot perceive an object that does not exist; nor can he remember an object that does not exist; but there appears to me to be no contradiction in his conceiving an object that neither does nor ever did exist” (Thomas Reid, Essay 4 in Essays on the intellectual Powers of Man, 1785).
Lithuanian photographer and artist, Tadao Cern, created an interesting substitute for those who would like to see an actual, historical photograph of Vincent Van Gogh. Based on one of Van Gogh’s last self-portraits, Cern produced an intriguing digital simulation of a photograph of Van Gogh, a kind of digital Ersatz photograph, if you like.
Virtual Vincent Recommends!