Researchers Turn Computer Into Poker Shark

According to the researchers at the University of Alberta, a computer program dubbed as “Cepheus” has been able to solve the game of Poker. Cepheus, has been created by computer poker research group, asserts that it can not only play heads-up limit Texas hold'em poker, but also beat human opponents.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, games like poker and chess have always been used as the test beds by researchers who are looking towards developing new concepts. There have been many success scenarios in the past like IBM's Deep Blue, which had defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in chess, and IBM's Watson, which defeated top-ranking Jeopardy! Champions. When it comes to a game of poker, it gives special challenges to artificial intelligence researchers because the computers or the players do not have the complete knowledge of past events and also they cannot see the cards held by their opponents.

Test of Cepheus: 

According to CPRG, any game can be solved if it is played over a period of time and if it is played with 95% confidence. The computer was trained to test Cepheus with poker over a period of two months. During this time it utilized more than 4,000 CPUs, and each of this CPU can handle 6 billion hands of poker. This was more poker which had been played by my entire human race.

Each of this hand, Cepheus constantly kept on managing its play and the choices kept on refining their choices and to find the best possible solution to each move. The main effort of University of Alberta's effort is to use a computer to play and win an imperfect information game when compared to perfect information games like checkers, chess and tic-tac-toe. The players will have access to all the information pertaining to the game.

While developing Cepheus, the CPRG's goal was to make sure the technology is able to make the computer think in some of the imperfect situations. This technology can be applied to any situations where there is a possibility of imperfect situations. According to Neil Burch, a Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta and a coauthor of the study, it will be interesting to see this research being used in different problems. As far as Cepheus is concerned, it has proved its power with the cards but no one can say about its ability as it will be dependent on the limitation of the computational capabilities.

Computers will learn more as the time passes by as CPU/GPU, storage and RAM will continue to evolve which will allow more complex supercomputing, software programming and problem solving. When it comes to computer, if it goes wrong it will learn to go right and take the correct step in the situation again.

It is important for the computer to learn every possible step based on the database and determine the best possible move. Even though the artificial intelligence has lot awaiting in the future, Cepheus has a lot of contribution towards it.

Kepler-438b and 442b: Are These the Planets We're Looking For?

Tuesday was one of best days for astronomers as they announced that they have discovered eight new planets which are potentially habitable planets and they are further than our solar system. Two of discovered planets are mostly similar to our planet Earth. All these eight planets have been located for the first time in their far-away suns by NASA's Kepler mission. These planets are pretty much in their habitable zone or so called region which is expected to have liquid water existing on the surface of their orbiting planet. However, two of these eight planets are expected to be made out of Rock and similar to Earth.

What are these planets? 

Kepler-438b, which is 12 percent greater than Earth in diameter and made up of 70 percent of being rocky actually lies nearly 475 light-years away. On the other hand, Kepler-442b is expected to be light-years away and nearly one-third larger than Earth. This also has 60 percent chances of being rocky. These new candidates have already been added to the "Hall of Fame" of NASA Kepler for being a potential habitable-zone planet.

All about these promising candidates

Both Kepler-442b and Kepler-438b, orbit red dwarf stars. These stars are not only smaller but also cooler when compared to the sun. Kepler-438b has been expected to circle its star every 35 days but still can receive more than 40 percent light when compared to Earth. According to the parameters, this planet has 70 percent chances of being in the habitable zone of its star.

On the other hand, Kepler-442b usually completes its orbit in about 112 days and can get 2/3rd as lighter as Earth. According to the scientists, there are 97% chances of the planet being in the habitable zone. According to David Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and second author on the paper, they are not sure if the planets are habitable based on their samples but still they fall in being the promising candidates.

According to the records, the two most Earth-like planets known were Kepler-186f is 1.1 times the size of Earth and Kepler-62f, which is 1.4 times as big as Earth.

Neighbourhood like Earth: 

At the moment, the data can only help in giving details about the size of the planet, the distance of the planet and the amount of energy it gets from its sun. The data still doesn’t give a clear picture about the actual facts about a planet. However, Kepler-438b is expected to be the closest to Earth. Astronauts have been able to find many planets not only similar to Earth but they are most likely filling up our neighbourhood.

According to NASA, Kepler mission was mainly designed to establish the statistics of Earth-like planets and finding planets similar to stars is no longer rare. Even though there are a promising future in studying these planets, but still it is difficult to find complete information about them. Scientists believe that there are millions and millions of planets in our milky way.

Self-Driving Concept Cars Impress at CES

During the International CES 2015 in Las Vegas, CEO Mark fields announced that Ford Motor is constantly focusing on the concept of bringing out the autonomous automobiles to the masses. According to the CEO, even though Ford might not be the first company who is producing a self-driving car, but still it can certainly be the first company who is delivering a car which falls totally out of the concept of luxury cars. He also suggested that fully autonomous cars might hit the streets (if not the highways, by end of 2020 but one thing to notice is that it might not be from Ford as expected.

According to Michael Rogers of the Practical Futurist, Fields is not suggesting that the autonomous cars will be completely adopted by people by 2020 but he meant to say that it will be commercially available at certain price. At the CES show this week, automobile converged with computerized technology has been generating a lot of attention. According to Tania Yuki, CEO of Shareable, self driving car has been able to generate the most required buzz like never before. The biggest potential of this technology lies with the ride-sharing. The biggest question remains if the technology will be able to change the means of transportation in future.

Driverless concept: 

While Ford was able to put forth their concept of driver less cars, luxury automakers like Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz actually was the front runner at CES. The demo of F015 Luxury in Motion concept car by Mercedes-Benz took everyone by surprise. This car is fully autonomous and powered by a fuel cell and battery that produces no carbon emissions. The front seat in the car can swivel 180 degrees and make all the four passengers can easily face each another. This car is only about concept and most likely won’t be on the public roads, at least till 2030.

Still a long road ahead

The jack in Audi was able to pilot their car nearly 550 miles to Las Vegas and used an amalgamation of a laser scanner dubbed "LIDAR," five radar systems, and numerous 3D cameras. When the car gets into a heavy traffic area it directs the driver to take over the manual control. This feature is being promoted as comfort feature as it will be able to reduce the stress to the driver in many situations.

As far as the future of this technology is concerned, it is not guaranteed whether it will help the people with their driving; it will certainly help in making the roads safe all around. BMW came forward with the demonstration of their i3 electric car, which features its Active-Assist technology. This system will give a 360 degree around the car and serve as the foundation of the automated valet system BMW.

Safety is the main concern for every company in the automobile. This concept is all about providing assistance in safety of the driver and it will ensure that more automobiles are on the road.

Facebook Buys Voice Recognition Start-Up Wit.ai

Facebook has recently announced that it had successfully acquired Wit.ai which a speech recognition and natural language processing service. The social media giant in last few years has acquired some of the essential start ups and highly performing tech companies both in order to eliminate the competition and to boost its resources and revenue. Acquiring the Wit.ai would help Facebook in developing various related features on its platform as well as it gives Facebook an opportunity to invest in new products.

What is Wit.ai? 

Wit.ai was founded by Alex Lebrun, Laurent Landowski and Willy Blandin in 2013 with a goal of building as service which would bring revolution in the wearable technological products. This start up mainly worked to make it easier and simpler for the developers to build voice interfaces for multiple numbers of gadgets and devices. It streamlined the voice interfaces for the mobile applications, wearable devices and the website which offer voice support for improved functionality. Interestingly Wit.ai had raised $3 million in October with funding round led by the venture capital firm Andreeseen Horowitz.

Wit.ai appeared to be extremely delighted and enthusiastic about the takeover by the Facebook. They see this acquisition as an incredible acceleration in the execution of their vision. They believe with Facebook unlimited resources and with their great talent they could create a new revolution. Wit.ai team had maintained that the platform will remain open and eventually it will become completely free for everyone.

How Facebook Will Benefit From This Acquisition

The buying of Wit.ai by Facebook suggests an indication towards reaching out to the consumers on almost every kind of gadget they might be using. Nowadays consumers use a wide variety of device to get connected to internet which ranges from traditional computers, tablets to smartphones. Wit.ai simply makes the much needed software which can understand spoken words and written text in splendid fashion. And it is already being used by hundreds of apps and devices at the moment.

Using this feature of Wit.ai Facebook is expected to make its website much more accessible from all kinds of gadgets. Facebook users would also get the ability to speak commands that could be converted as texts as posts or messages. It will help in increasing it wider penetration among the masses as well as it will be bringing in cosy revenue. This technology offers various implementation, advantages and usages; Facebook would certainly keep surprising its users in upcoming year.

The Future Prospects and Returns For Facebook

Facebook has announced its deal in the ongoing International Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where tech companies are showing off their upcoming devices. Facebook rivals mainly the ‘Big Three’ Apple Inc., Microsoft Inc and Google Inc already have an integrated voice recognition technology in to their mobile operating systems for mobile.

Facebook clearly understands that voice recognition would play a vital role in mainstream adoption of the internet connected devices and the wearable technological devices. Buying Wit.ai just keeps Facebook step ahead of its competitors.

Halo 5: Guardians Multiplayer Beta Preview - a New Hope?

Since the announcement of the game, the Xbox One gamers have been eagerly waiting for the announcement of the game. At present, the gamers were expecting the game to be launched in early 2015 but now looks like the developers have nearly pushed the release of the game to the end of the year. Still the developers have managed to go ahead with the beta test of their multiplayer section.

The Halo Series: 

The halo series has always been synonymous with the Xbox Brand and more than that, it is the very first successful first-person-shooter (FPS) game on a console. There are players who have now gone bored of all sort of running games and especially games like Call of Duty (CoD). Halo: Combat Evolved is a sci-fi FPS that will put the players in the role of Master Chief, who is a human super soldier who squared off against an alien force known as the Covenant.

Even though single-player campaign still had a strong but the multiplayer games have really caught everyone's attention. Multiplayer revolutionized the genre and made the first-person-shooters on consoles playable, instinctive, and most importantly, fun. This is a genre, which was running for the longest time on domain of PCs and meant for PC only. There are players who still find the keyboard and mouse combination on desktop computers best to play these kinds of games but 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved and its sequel Halo 2 have proven that slick controls and multiplayer goodness are better for consoles.

The latest game in this series is the Halo 5 but there are difficulties that have been faced by the developers. Developer Bungie has created five Halo games (the three main series entries, and side-stories ODST and Reach), will be ending his partnership with Microsoft and will be moving the Halo series to 343 Industries. Halo 4 series was one of the games which received mixed responses, some of the players complained that the game lacked innovation while others that the game keeps on changing all the time.

Now, 343 Industries is getting all prepared for the release of Halo 5. Even-though there still time for the final release but an early multiplayer beta has been started on the Xbox One for those people who have already picked up Halo: The Master Chief Collection - a compilation of the first four games that makes the players as Master Chief in the series. The beta version started on December 29, 2014 and is expected to continue till the date January 18, 2015.

Whether the new game work or not, but still the previous version Halo 4 has only managed to get meager 20,000 peak population day a year after release, Halo 3's on the other hand got 1.1 million and Halo Reach's got 900,000. It will be quite interesting to see how 343 Industries will be able to manage to maintain what seems to be a very inquisitive mix of old and new.