A few days ago the fundraising campaign for “Descent: Underground” ended. It’s a video game of the first-person-shooter (FPS) type, a reboot of the classic video game “Descent”. The fundraising was conducted using the crowdfunding method on the famous Kickstarter website. In order to proceed with the funding it was necessary to raise $600,000 and they raised $601.773.
IBM’s cognitive computing system Watson has already been used in recent years in health projects. In recent days, IBM announced a new commitment in this field with the creation of the business unit Watson Health devoted to developing solutions to improve the quality and effectiveness of health care by customizing it to individual needs.
In recent years, IBM has been adapting the technology of its cognitive computing system Watson to many different activities. Lately, it’s also launching Chef Watson, a version of this intelligence artificial that specializes in inventing new recipes. The idea is to get it to recognize people’s tastes to provide customized recipes.
Cognitive computing aims to reproduce human thought. In the case of recipes, the process is called “cognitive cooking”. For the training necessary to make it learn this art, Chef Watson analyzed thousands of recipes including the database of 9,000 recipes of the magazine “Bon Appétit” and studied the Wikipedia files to learn associations among different ingredients and different cuisines.
NASA has made available for all desktop computers an application that can help increase the number of asteroids discovered by amateur astronomers. It’s the result of NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge initiative, which included the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge. Conducted in collaboration with Planetary Resources, a company interested in asteroid mining, in 2014, it offered $55,000 in prizes for those who developed improved algorithms to identify asteroids in the images captured by telescopes.
DeepMind Technologies, a company that develops artificial intelligence acquired by Google a little over a year ago, is developing a machine that can play with 49 classic video games of the Atari 2600 console. This system, called Deep Q-network (DQN), achieved a great ability to play, even exceeding the capacity of human beings. So far nothing strange since by now computers can beat humans in complex games but the important fact is that this artificial intelligence learned to on its own.
