Artificial intelligence bots have reclaimed the advantage in their battle with Captcha challenges – and the scary part is they’ve done it by aping what was thought to be humans’ advantage. The Captcha challenges in question are the ones that involve identifying a string of characters despite distortions such as wavy text or cluttered backgrounds. […]
Konami is to make a movie of the 80s coin-op game Contra, with an accompanying TV show. Details are slim, but it will be live action rather than animated. Konami didn;t give any details of the plot of the movie. The game of course featured two Contra members using guerilla war tactics to infiltrate an […]
Microsoft has stopped manufacturing the Kinect, meaning only stock currently with retailers will be sold. The technology will instead continue to be developed in Microsoft’s HoloLens device. The news was revealed in an interview with Fast Company, with Microsoft also noting it will continue to support the Kinect for console users. The general reaction has […]
Two code enthusiasts earned themselves $1,000 by deciphering a QR code from a TV broadcast despite It being blurred out. Clement Storck and Michel Sassano were able to reconstruct the code, which represented a Bitcoin private key. It was part of a competition that turned out to be considerably more difficult than designed. Robert Ver, […]
Deluxe editions are often little more than fancier packaging, but the upcoming The Legend Of Zelda Encyclopedia’s deluxe edition is very fancy indeed. Apart from the gold casing, it also has both the look and (as much as possible with cardboard) feel of a NES cartridge. There’s also a protective sleeve similar to a box […]
If you can’t get your hands on a Nintendo SNES Mini console, you can still get a mini Nintendo console that looks like a SNES. That’s thanks to a special edition design of the 3DS XL. The $200 handheld is in most respects simply a 3DS XL with a casing design that resembles the colors […]
Remember Google’s program that learned to beat champion Go players? It’s been comprehensively beaten by its successor, which learned the game from scratch. AlphaGo Zero, which worked without any game history data, beat the original AlphaGo in a 100 match series by a margin of 100 games to zero. Go has always been a challenge […]
Sony has licensed a mini PS4 gamepad for children who struggle with the full-size controller. The Mini Wired Gamepad is 40 percent smaller than the standard DualShock 4. The “Mini Wired Gamepad, produced by Hori, is a single curved rectangle rather than the inverted bunny ears of the standard controller. Sony says that makes it […]
Activision wants to arrange mismatches in online games so that the less experienced player spends more on microtransactions. That’s not a conspiracy theory but rather a directly stated goal of a system it’s just patented. It’s arguable whether this should be considered to its credit or not, but there’s absolutely no subtlety or euphemisms in […]
A collision between two neutron stars – a kilonova – has been detected for the first time. It took place 130 million years ago and produced gravitational waves, rupturing spacetime in the way predicted by Einstein. The collision also produced gold and platinum, a process that was the accepted theory for those elements but only […]