NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Clever Video Game Controls Curiosity on Mars

The Curiosity Mars Rover prompted high fives and cheers when it landed successfully Sunday night, but now the hard part begins. Equipped with 3-D goggles and sophisticated software, humans are able to control everything the rover does. Think of this as the ultimate video game.

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Driving and controlling the rover isn't like steering a remote-control car here on Earth, according to Brian Cooper, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's lead driver. Cooper, who created software for every previous Mars rover, explained the difference to Gizmodo's Brent Rose. Since there's up to a 20-minute delay in the signal between Earth and Curiosity, the rover could inadvertently drive off a cliff.

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To help the science and engineering teams determine where the exciting prospects are on the planet, Cooper's software allows them to plot paths for the rover. And, for the first time, the rover is transmitting images from stereoscopic cameras so Cooper and his colleagues can see the Mars landscape in 3-D from Curiosity's point of view. These unique views help the team spot potential obstacles for the slow-moving rover. Drivers spend long hours preparing the rover's next moves. Using simulation software, the team drives Curiosity over obstacles to see how it will potentially perform. According to the article:

"The planners can put on a pair of 3D glasses to see the terrain with a sense of scale and distance. So they plan out what looks to be the best route, they send the commands, and then they rely on the rover's intelligence to improvise a way to get there."

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Manipulating everything from the arm and the drill to the wheels itself is all done with keyboard an mouse. However, unlike Spirit and Opportunity (RIP), this rover has built-in intelligence to move autonomously and avoid obstacles in the process. That's a mode not usually employed, though, according to Maxwell. During most of its long journey to Mount Sharp to look for evidence of life, Curiosity will be human-operated.

"You never know what you're going to find," Cooper told Gizmodo. Even if they don't find anything surprising, in my mind driving a Mars rover equals 1 gazillion points.

Image: An artist's rendering of the Curiosity Rover on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Card Game for Wannabe Hackers

Control-Alt-Hack: $30.00

Think you’re an expert hacker? The “Control-Alt-Hack” card game will put your so-called skills to the test. Developed by professor Yoshi Kohno of the Security and Privacy Research Lab at the University of Washington, this old-school game is geared toward a younger generation with basic knowledge of computer science.

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Three to six players can become part of “Hackers Inc.,” a fictional computer security auditing company that instructs players to break into different kinds of systems and expose security flaws. Fifty-six mission cards lay out different hacking challenges. Each player gets a mission and has to decide what tactic he or she will take when the dice is rolled.

Different methods of hacking include hardware hacking, hacking software through coding, accessing networks, social networking hacks or constructing/deconstructing cryptographic ciphers. The different tactics and a points system that goes along with the dice rolls are a little confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, it makes for a fun and challenging way to test your skills.

The game isn’t necessarily for educational purposes, but Kohno and his team did incorporate real-life hacker issues into it. While it may not be completely educational, U.S.-based educators can request a free copy of the game before it goes on sale in the fall.

via GeekWire

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Secret To Beating Roulette Wheel Revealed

A way to beat the roulette was kept under wraps for decades -- until now.

Roulette seems random because of the way the ball bounces around before it comes to rest. The casino's "house" has an advantage of just a percentage point or two, and that's all that's necessary to come out ahead. And, the complex and chaotic bouncing of the ball is what makes roulette a very difficult game to cheat.

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Until the 1970s, when a man named Doyne Farmer came up with a way to beat the wheel. He used an early computer to do the number crunching -- a pretty notable feat then, since portable laptops wouldn't become common for another twenty years. But he didn't publish his findings because he didn't want to encourage cheating at casinos.

Now Michael Small, a mathematician at the University of Western Austrailia, and Chi Kong Tse, an electronic engineer from Hong Kong Plytechnic University, have developed their own algorithm for beating roulette. They submitted a paper to the journal Chaos. Farmer decided that there was no reason to keep quiet anymore.

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So how did they do it? It turns out that you don't have to follow the bouncing ball exactly. Both methods are based on the motion of the ball as it leaves the dealer's hand and rolls around the side of the wheel. Those motions are actually quite predictable. It's also possible to track how many times the wheel has spun and what part of it the ball is likely to hit when it first rolls onto it.

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At that point, the ball bounces around the wheel, but even then it's possible to guess the region where the ball will land. Small and Tse used the physics of friciton to predict the half of the wheel a ball would land in 13 out of 22 times. That may not sound good, but it means that they were above the 50 percent mark -- enough to make a profit. Usually, a European roulette wheel is set to return -2.7 percent, but Small and Tse got up to 18 percent. A gambler willing to play a lot of rounds would profit.

Farmer's algorithm was similar, except instead of measuring the friction on the ball to determine where it would drop onto the wheel, he used air resistance.

Tse and Small note that this kind of "cheating" is probably detectable, since the only way to make it work would be with a smartphone camera watching the wheel or some kind of overhead system, which would be a bit conspicuous to say the least.

Another way the casino could catch you is via the betting patterns. Gambling author (and fellow Discovery News blogger) Scott Tharler noted that if a person bets in a certain way and keeps winning, it becomes pretty clear that there's something going on. A dealer can also throw off the roulette wheel algorithm by altering the way he or she releases the ball onto the wheel. Casinos are good at spotting that kind of thing, and people have been trying to cheat every game for decades. "The casinos are still there," Tharler said.

Via: New Scientist, PhysOrg

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Uutela

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Art of Video Games On Display

It's not hard to find "The Art of Video Games" at the Smithsonian Institution's American Art Museum in downtown Washington, D.C. For one thing, this exhibit tends to draw a crowd. For another, nowhere else in this museum will you hear the familiar tones of a Pac-Man arcade machine echoing from around a corner.

The exhibit, which opened March 16 and runs through Sept. 30 before embarking a tour of 10 other U.S. cities, aims to lend games overdue credit as a creative medium. But what it does better is give gamers and ex-gamers of a certain age a heady nostalgia trip.

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For that you can credit the hardware-centric organization of "TAOVG." The heart of the exhibit is a lineup of 20 game consoles and home computers, from the Atari 2600 VCS to the Sony PlayStation 3, featuring interactive displays of four representative games for each system (as picked in online voting last year).

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Defining the history of games by the hardware they ran on makes it easy for gray-haired attendees to lapse into remember-when reveries. But it also seems to have led to much of the commentary on these featured games, read aloud in minute-long recorded monologues, focusing on their mechanics instead of their art.

Over two visits last week, I learned far more about how a console or computer's hardware constrained or enabled a game's graphics -- for example, in Donkey Kong for Colecovision, Jumpman wore "a simple cap because hair was too difficult to render" -- than about that title's aesthetic achievements or context.

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There are notable exceptions; Bethesda Softworks' Fallout is praised for its "dark humor" and political overtones, while an entry on Nintendo's Star Fox 64 draws out its ties to Japanese folk culture. Sega's vibrant, colorful Rez for its Dreamcast console gets a nod for taking inspiration from the expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky.

But entire aspects of game culture -- the industry's weakness for sequels and titles spun off of mass-media properties like movies, feats of pop-culture cross-pollination like Pac-Manhattan or the "All your base are belong to us" meme, its occasional controversies with sexism and violence -- go unmentioned here. (The description of Eidos's Tomb Raider touts heroine Lara Croft as "a tough, fearless woman" but doesn't mention the... efficient use of fabric in her outfits.)

I hate to beat up on the exhibit for leaving out certain games when its frequently-asked-questions page (PDF) already sounds apologetic enough. But, seriously: no Tetris? Only that omission makes the absence of groundbreaking titles like Choplifter and World of Warcraft seem less glaring.

Likewise, the hardware selection here seems questionable. Can you really argue that the Dreamcast made a bigger dent in the industry than the Nintendo Game Boy or the iPhone?

Yet mobile devices get no acknowledgment here, nor do social games like Zynga's FarmVille. And arcade machines are largely neglected except for a playable copy of Pac-Man, available after you walk through a short gallery of game concept art and interviews with game creators.

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There, for a few minutes, you can relive your own arcade experience from decades ago (yes, Namco's title turned 30 two years ago). You can also enjoy equally brief turns at Nintendo's 1985-vintage Super Mario Brothers, LucasArts' The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Cyan's Myst (1995, and still inscrutable after all these years) and thatgamecompany's evocative 2009 "interactive poem" Flower.

And then: Game over. I left the exhibit wishing it had some hidden bonus levels I could unlock with the right cheat code.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro / Discovery

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Play a Video Game, Help Cure a Disease

Video gamers are advancing the frontiers of science. Already, they've played games that ultimately help map the shapes of proteins. Now they're also advancing scientists’ knowledge of genetics.

A Web-based video game called Phylo allows game players to arrange sequences of colored blocks that represent nucleotides of human DNA. The game asks the players to recognize patterns and match them up in closely related species, comparing their results to a computer and scoring them. Phylo was developed by Dr. Jerome Waldispuhl of the McGill University School of Computer Science and collaborator Mathieu Blanchette.  

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By looking at the similarities and differences between these DNA sequences, scientists can get insight into genetically based diseases. For example, one part of the game shows a human and a mouse, and the challenge is to align the nucleotides correctly in a gene connected with familial Alzheimer’s disease. Once that is completed, the two sequences are compared with that of a dog and a new level of the game starts.

The trick is aligning the nucleotides -- the order can’t be changed, but figuring out where along the sequence each one should go is a challenge, especially when one considers less-closely related species. That kind of intuitive pattern recognition is not something computers are very good at. This doesn’t mean humans can replace computers. In this instance, machines did a lot of the heavy lifting. But the problem was the case of misaligned sequences, which the computers weren’t always able to spot.

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The game was launched in November 2010. Since thenm 17,000 registered players have contributed more than 350,000 solutions to alignment sequence problems. An added perk: players can also choose which specific disease they’d like to help with, such as cancer or leukemia.

Via McGill University

Image: McGill University

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People Will Virtually Kill One to Save Five

It’s a moral and ethical problem that has been studied before: you see a train heading towards five hikers and you have the power to save them. Just pull a switch to make the train swerve out of the way on another track. BUT you’ll kill another hiker who won’t see the train coming at all. What do you do? Intervene? Or no?

Variations on this have vexed philosophers (and their students) for decades. Carlos David Navarrete, an evolutionary psychologist at Michigan State University, decided to apply a little technology to the problem.

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He created a 3D, virtual environment in which subjects would experience the actual situation. Each subject was given a joystick that would throw the (virtual) switch, thus saving five people by sacrificing one. To monitor their emotional states, he attached sensors to the subjects’ fingertips. This is the first time anyone has measured a “physical” response to the ethical dilemma.

The result itself wasn’t that surprising: of the 147 participants, 133 (90.5 percent) pulled the switch to divert the train, resulting in the death of the one person. Fourteen participants allowed the train to kill the five. Eleven participants did not pull the switch at all, while three pulled the switch but then returned it to its original position. All this is consistent with earlier studies that didn’t use virtual reality.

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The new data shows, however, that participants who did not pull the switch were more emotionally aroused. Nobody knows why that is. It may be because people “freeze up” during highly anxious moments, such as when soldiers fail to use their weapons in battle, Navarrete said in a press release.

For Navarette, the interesting thing was that while most people made the utilitarian choice -– sacrificing one to save many –- humans have to overcome a natural aversion to hurting other people. Rationalizing the choice (weighing the costs and benefits) can help people overcome that to make tough decisions like that. But in some cases, a person can get so anxious that they can’t make a decision at all, or make the wrong one.

Image / Video: Michigan State University

Online Game Does Real World Good

WeTopia: Free

Mindless online gaming is a nice passtime when things are a little hectic and you need a break. What if, at the same time you're helping yourself out by living vicariously through your Sims character, you were also helping out children in need? That’s the premise behind WeTopia, an online game from Sojo studios that has partnered with Save the Children, Haiti Partners and ten other nonprofits. A preview version was launched last week and already had players from 20 different countries.

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The game is like every other social online game: you mange a community and interact with friends. However in WeTopia, gamers earn “joy” for playing. When enough joy is earned, players can send it to whatever nonprofit they choose. The game will earn profits through corporate sponsorships, ads and pledges and donate at least 20 percent to its nonprofit partners. If they make a profit, 50 percent of it will be donated and divided equally by the amount of joy given. The game is free to play, but users are given the option to buy items in the game, like trees or medicine, and one of the game's partners will donate the item to a community in Haiti or in the United States. 

Via: GOOD

Credit: WeTopia

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Urinal Lets You Pee 'N Play

 

What’s the best way to avoid weird eye contact and unintentional glancing while standing at a urinal? Play a hands-free video game. (After all, hands are otherwise occupied.) Captive Media’s hands-free video game was first shown off at the Exhibit Bar in South London. It’s a 12-inch LCD screen with integrated sensors mounted on top of a urinal. When not in use, the screens display ads until someone walks up and unzips. Once he does, the urinal switches to game mode. Users by steering and adjusting their flow.

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When they're “relieved,” the screen displays a score and compares it to other players. Captive Media has even set up an online score center where codes from gameplay can be entered and guys can brag about their scores on Facebook and Twitter. Check out the video below to see some enthusiastic British guys (and girls) talk about the game and get a virtual peek into how it works. Speaking of girls, don’t worry ladies, Creative Media is designing a game for us, too. However it’s more geared towards getting through the long lines before you get to the stall. The company has had massive interest from over the world, including in the United States, in various venues like airports, stadiums and of course, bars. The company plans to announce where the urinals will be sold in 2012.

Via: TechWatch

Credit: Creative Media

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Joystick Replicates Air Forces' A10 Stick

Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog: $499.99

What's the difference between a Sweathog and a Warthog? Ask John Travolta. Just before becoming a Sweathog 36 years ago on "Welcome Back Kotter," he earned his wings as a pilot. So he may be familiar with the fact that Warthog is the nickname of the U.S. Airforce's A-10 Thunderbolt II, a highly advanced air-to-ground support craft. Thrustmaster's H.O.T.A.S. (Hands on Throttle and Stick) Warthog dual replica gaming control is modeled after the modified A-10C version.

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So strap in, blast the appropriate background music and get ready to feel like an actual A-10 pilot while flying in a combat simulation game. Its H.E.A.R.T. (Hall Effect AccuRate Technology) utilizes 3D magnetic sensors designed to maintain maximal precision over time. Each throttle features a weighted base, metal hand rest, adjustable friction system and realistic buttons, switches and disengageable afterburner detent. So with practice, you'll be ready to fly your own mission, Maverick.

Credit: Guillemot Corporation

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Reduce Eye Fatigue by Backlighting Your Monitor

Antec soundscience halo 6 LED bias lighting kit: $12.95

You're dying to find new ways to extend the amount of time you can comfortably sit in front of your computer screen, right? Well, if you're a serious gamer, designer, writer -- pretty much anyone who spends long sessions in front of a monitor -- you're probably aware of how that can pummel your peepers. One of the recommended tips for reducing computer eye strain is to control the screen glare caused by both indoor and outdoor lighting. But sitting in a dark room with just the light of your display isn't very vision-friendly either.

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Antec's soundscience halo 6 LED bias lighting kit is a 15-inch strip of -- you guessed it -- six carefully calibrated lights that you affix to the back of your monitor. Powered by a USB connection, the subtle white backlight not only allows you to comfortably view your screen for extended times in an otherwise darkened environment, but also improves your monitor's perceived contrast ratio. So halo 6 will be a great way to, say, enjoy marathon sessions of the upcoming Halo 4. (No relation.)

Credit: Antec

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