UMBC GAIM mentioned in Business Gazette

The Business Gazette has an article on serious games today, focusing especially on Maryland companies Will Interactive, Breakaway, and Firaxis. I was interviewed for the article, and it closes with a mention of the new UMBC GAIM programs!

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Baltimore IGDA chapter to meet 7:00pm Tue 8/28

Baltimore has an active local chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IDGA). The IDGA describes itself as

“The IGDA is a non-profit professional society that is committed to advancing the careers and enhancing the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community.”

The Baltimore IGDA chapter will meet this Tuesday, August 28th, at the Treehouse Restaurant & Lounge in Cockeysville starting at 7pm (Map). The meeting is open to everyone, but attendees are encouraged to sign up as IGDA members.

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UMBC Multicore Computing Center

With support and collaboration from IBM, UMBC has established the UMBC Multicore Computing Center (MC2) to investigate applications of new parallel processing technologies, including the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. We will integrate 12 IBM BladeCenter QS20s, each with dual 3.2-GHz CBEs into our existing Bluegrit supercomputing cluster, which includes a a 116 core PowerPC cluster. The new processors will be connected by Gigabit Ethernet and 20-Gbit/second Infiniband links.

So, what does this have to do with games? A lot.

The CBE was jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba and first used in Sony’s PS3. Game consoles can take advantage of high-performance computing to support their graphics and the CBE is what makes the PS3 special. But looking beyond speeding up 3D graphics, there are many more demands that games will make on processors — managing large artificial worlds, making computer controlled game characters more intelligent, adding speech and language processing, etc.

The UMBC MC2 will provide our game programs with a unique asset — a chance for students in the computer science track to learn about multicore and cell processors and, importantly, how to write programs to take advantage of them. Software engineers with experience with these new processor technologies are in high demand in the game industry as well as for any applications that have high computational demands.

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Do computers play games like humans?

Ten years ago IBM’s Deep Blue beat then reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov in an exhibition match under regular time control. So what does this mean — about the minds computers and people?

Noted Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett has an article, Higher Games, in this month’s Technology Review in which he discuses the meaning of event.

“Chess requires brilliant thinking, supposedly the one feat that would be–forever–beyond the reach of any computer. But for a decade, human beings have had to live with the fact that one of our species’ most celebrated intellectual summits–the title of world chess champion–has to be shared with a machine, Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match in 1997. How could this be? What lessons could be gleaned from this shocking upset? Did we learn that machines could actually think as well as the smartest of us, or had chess been exposed as not such a deep game after all?”

(spotted on AAAI’s AI in the News)

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Maryland: East Coast Hub For Gaming

The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development has published a a new directory that lists dozens of companies and facilities in Maryland focused on Modeling and simulation. These include companies that develop and publish games as well as others that develop products and services that use the same technology for non-game applications. See the full 2007 Maryland MODSIM Modeling and simulation Directory for a complete list of companies and organizations.

The introduction asks “Why Maryland?” and offers these points in answer.

• East Coast Hub For Gaming

  Maryland has one of the largest clusters of Modeling and Simulation (Mod-Sim) companies and facilities on the East Coast which provides great opportunities for growth and talent.

• Core to the rapidly growing medical modeling and simulation (MM&S) and serious gaming segments

  Maryland is the largest regional cluster of MM&S and Serious Gaming companies as well the home for The Games for Health conferences.

• Access to market and technology

  
  Maryland offers a concentration of Mod-Sim and MM&S companies and a proximity to over 50 federal agencies and associated research facilities that have Modeling and Simulation technology as their specific focus.

• Access to a knowledge workforce and research

  Maryland provides immediate access to top universities producing the knowledge workforce of today and tomorrow as well as cutting edge research.

• Technology transfer opportunities

  A wealth of untapped technology transfer opportunities exist for cutting edge companies involved in Mod-Sim, 2D and 3D animation, Digital Production, Digital Design, Interactive Technology, MM&S, and emerging applications.

• A cluster of affinity organizations to promote the Mod-Sim market place

  This includes the Maryland Modeling and Simulation Analysis Council (MMSAC), Games for Health Initiative, and the Advanced Initiative in Medical Simulation.

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Business Week sees big grown in game industry

An article in Business Week, Getting Serious About Gaming, quotes a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment & Media Practice that predicts strong and steady grown in the game industry.

Like happening upon a gnome in the online fantasy game World of Warcraft or breaking the speed limit in Grand Theft Auto, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ June analysis of the growth of the global video game industry is hardly surprising. In its annual report “Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2007-2011,” the financial firm predicts the video game market will continue to expand at a compound annual rate of 9.1% over the next five years. Other reports, such as the NPD Group’s annual report on the U.S. gaming industry, show similar growth.

The BW article also discusses two additional grown areas not covered in the report — the use of game technology for training and combining games with online social networking systems.

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Rubic’s cube solvable in 26 moves

Northeastern Computer Science PhD student Daniel Kunkle has proven that any configuration of a Rubik’s cube can be solved in 26 moves or fewer moves. The previous upper bound was 27.

D. Kunkle and G. Cooperman, “Twenty-Six Moves Suffice for Rubik’s Cube”, Proceedings of International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC ‘07), ACM Press, 2007, 235–242.

The number of moves required to solve any state of Rubik’s cube has been a matter of long-standing conjecture for over 25 years — since Rubik’s cube appeared. This number is sometimes called “God’s number”. An upper bound of 29 (in the face-turn metric) was produced in the early 1990’s, followed by an upper bound of 27 in 2006. An improved upper bound of 26 is produced using 8000 CPU hours. One key to this result is a new, fast multiplication in the mathematical group of Rubik’s cube. Another key is efficient out- of-core (disk-based) parallel computation using terabytes of disk storage. One can use the precomputed data structures to produce such solutions for a specific Rubik’s cube position in a fraction of a second. Work in progress will use the new “brute-forcing” technique to further reduce the bound.

Note that their approach used seven terabytes of distributed disk to hold tables needed for the algorithm.

See Cracking the Cube in Science News for a good overview. (spotted on Boing Boing)

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Survey reveals gamers unaware of console capabilities

Ars Technica reports on a survey of 6,260 people that game console users are unaware of some of the advanced capabilities of their boxes.

“The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles are marvels of technology. The PlayStation 3 features a Blu-ray player, the ability to stream video and music from your PC, and it’s a very impressive upscaling DVD player. The 360 has a robust selection of movies and television shows you can purchase and rent through the Xbox Live service, and with VGA or HDMI connections it will also upscale your DVDs. For some gamers, these functions go a long way towards justifying the high price of these systems, but a new study from the NPD Group suggests that not only are people not using these functions, they’re not even aware of them.”

(spotted on slashdot)

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Bank run on Ginko Financial signals Second Life economic crisis

Technology Review reports on Money Trouble in Second Life.

“There’s a long line of avatars waiting to use the automatic-teller machines for Ginko Financial, a virtual bank in the online game Second Life. For more than a week, account holders have been demanding their money back in what some folks are calling a bank run. Set off by high interest rates and a recent ban on in-game gambling, the bank run could ultimately have a major effect on the game’s economy. The theft of approximately $12,000 from the Second Life World Stock Exchange doesn’t help matters either.”

Unlike many MMOGs, Second Life has an active economy based on the Linden Dollar (L$) and encourages users to buy and sell game goods and real estate to one another. While the currency is fictional, TR reports

“But those dollars do have real-world value: players can buy or sell Linden dollars at a rate of about L$270 to $1 on the Lindex market. Second Life’s website even boasts that “thousands of residents are making part or all of their real life income from their Second Life businesses.”

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Computers master the game board

The Cristian Science Monitor has an article, Computers master the game board surveying the state of computers’ ability to play traditional games like chess, scrabble and go.

“They reign supreme in checkers and chess. Poker may be next. What other areas will artificial intelligence soon dominate?”

The article is prompted, of course, by the recent news of the surprisingly good performance of the Polaris poker-playing program and the reduction of checkers to a “solved” game. Both of these are great accomplishments resulting from years of work by Jonathan Schaeffer and his colleagues and students at the University of Alberta.

If you are felling like it’s the “end of history” for programming computers to play traditional games, take heart — there are still plenty of challenges. Go is one of them

Some games are still too complicated for computers to master. The Japanese game of Go stands as the usual example. With a 19 by 19 grid, Go has an astronomical number of possible positions – think 1 followed by 100 zeros. Such a massive scale means computers don’t know where to focus.

“They’ve done eye tracking on Go experts,” says Susan Epstein, a computer science professor at Hunter College in New York City. “The studies found that while there are hundred of good moves in front of them, the best [human] players only see three or four.”

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