The site is in japanese but that shouldn’t harm your experience a bit. Click through the 10 questions and have your robot generated, then watch it move around and fight with other robots. The algorithm that moves them and animate the legs is intriguing, and the interface looks clean and polished, typical japanese design.
http://www.verbatim.jp/senshuken/
Created by IMG SRC/Non-Grid, Kaibutsu, and Masayuki Kido
There is a story about a student of information theory on his first day at college. He had entered a strange, bizarre world. The only sounds were the occasional calling out of a number by one of the professors, followed by laughter. One professor would say ‘52′, there would be a short pause then peals of laughter. Someone else says ‘713′, same thing, everyone falls down laughing.
“What’s going on here?” he asked his tutor.
“We’re telling jokes,” said his tutor.
“Telling jokes?”
“Yes, you see, we’ve all worked here so long we know each other’s jokes. There are a thousand of them. So, being information theorists we applied data compression. We just assigned them all numbers, 0 through 999. It saves a lot of time and effort. Would you like to try? Just say any number 0 to 999…”
He wasn’t fully convinced. But he tried. Very quietly he whispered “477″.
Hardly a murmur.
He looked at his tutor. “What’s wrong?” he said. “Try again,” says the tutor.
So he does. “318″ – same again, not a thing, hardly a murmur.
“Something’s wrong,” he says.
“Well,” says the tutor, “it’s like this – it’s not so much the joke as the way you tell it!”
There is a curious sequel to this story. This student eventually succeeded by accident in the most dramatic and unexpected way. He called out a number outside the range 0 to 999. “Minus 105,” he said.
At first there was stunned amazement, then first one professor laughed, then another then another, till they were all rolling about holding their sides.
None of them had heard that one before.
Taken from: The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech
given at the Zurich Seminar, April 1984, by John Gordon
Reading the iPhone Human Interface guidelines for inspiration on interface architecture design.
Alain de Botton gives us a refreshing perspective on success and failure on his witty presentation at TED
Watch the recording + comments at TED
A famous loose-cannon/American billionaire has a plan for unseating Google from its search-engine throne – and at a mere $1bn, his idea is significantly less expensive than the billions Microsoft is sinking into that Bing thing.
Broadcast.com co-founder and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s idea is simplicity itself: Just pay the top 1,000 websites a million bucks per to de-list themselves from Google.
Read the full article at The Register.
Chanced upon this indie game which had a game visual similar to that of microsoft’s photosynth demo.
Of course it only looks similar on the surface, the underlying technology seems much different in the sense that its unlikely the engine will arrange and stitch your photos in 3d. Having said that, the game play looks interesting enough.
Source: http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/11/trailer_trauma_krystian_majews.html
EA just spent $275 million (and up to $400 million in equity retention and variable cash considerations) to acquire Playfish, the social game company behind Pet Society and Restaurant City, popular games on social networks such as facebook and myspace.
For a comparison, Microsoft paid $375 mil for Rare, a record at that time.
Electronic Arts also bought Maxis (The Sims) for $125 mil and Westwood Studios (Command and Conquer) for $122.5 mil, and Intermix Media, parent company of myspace.com was accquired for $580 mil in cash by Fox’s News Corp.
Read the full article here.