Revolution's End

Conditions: Cold, Ominous

This Is How They Will Win

In further news of humans busily developing the means of their own demise,

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a robot that cheats at rock-paper-scissors by detecting the gesture you’re about to throw. It’s the automated equivalent of your jerk friend hesitating a moment before committing to their move — except that it happens at superhuman speed.

R-P-S is a great casual decision-maker. But the game only works if you and your opponent reveal your choices at the same time. Here, the robot perceives and acts faster than the human eye; it’s onto you as soon as your hand begins to form a shape. By the time you’ve landed your move, it’s already countered with the winning one.

- wired.com/

The video is quite illuminating - each time the human tries to throw a gesture the robot hand beats him. It's not doing so through intelligence or strategy, it can just do it through faster reaction times. And they talk of this being a newer, fresher kind of intelligence they are trying to give to robot-kind - a more physical kind of intelligence, as if that makes any kind of sense. I hope you'll remember this some day, decades from now, when you're huddling in an underground bunker eating rat and watching flickering flames in a hollowed-out television set.



Film Review: Brave

Princess movies have come a long way over the last few decades. Nowadays it's considered the norm to have rebellious tom-boy princesses who can stand on their own. So much so that I suspect were a movie to come out featuring a weak princess who needs to be rescued, it would actually be seen as something different and new. Anyway, Pixar front up with their princess movie Brave, featuring a Scottish princess who feels put upon by her mother, and doesn't want to be married off to some prince of another clan. So naturally she steals off into a forest and finds a witch to cast a spell to change her fate. One poisoned cake later and the princess now has to deal with what she's inadvertently done, which in this case is turn her mother into a bear.

So now she has to try and turn her mother back, which of course will involve a lot of mother-daughter bonding, some bear fights, and the Princess having to grow up in a hurry to stop the clans from falling back into war with each other. The plot is pretty straight forward, really, once you get over the whole bear thing. In fact I think the plot for a Pixar film is fairly low key. Unfortunately since we do hold Pixar to such high standards, low-key is a little disappointing.

I mean it's a gorgeous looking film, of course, and the characters sparkle as ever, but there's just not all that much going on. All we know of Princess Merida is that she's restless and rebellious. Of course we want her to not get married off, I guess, but other than that specific point, we're not really given all that much of her to care about. Is she nice? Fair? Smart? All we really know is she's Scottish, and, well... Oh look, bears! Two blue fairies out of Five.


- Peace out