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Unnerving hide-and-seek. A sequel to the heart-stopping 3D game, Granny: Chapter Two takes it to the next level by adding a new sinister figure called the Grandpa. You wake up in an abandoned house where Granny and Grandpa reside. The rules are simple: Find a way to escape the house without getting caught by the two. Granny hears everything and Grandpa can check where you are on the security cameras. If you make noise or get spotted, they'll come running for you. Gameplay: This game will make you feel like you're in a slasher horror flick, hiding from psychopathic killers. You are inside a house filled with movable objects that can be at your advantage or disadvantage. Collect items and find a way to get out of the house, just be sure to be careful because the Granny and Grandpa are just inside the house. Granny can hear noises and Grandpa can spot you through security cameras. Hiding places, traps, and puzzles also make the whole gameplay more thrilling. Download Granny for free at the App Store for iOS users, and Google Play Store for Android users.

With Amnesia: Rebirth, Frictional Games hopes to recapture the magic of the original while introducing some new concepts. Developer and publisher Frictional Games announced that it’s working on a new Amnesia game that looks like a fresh start for the series as well as a return to what made the original game work. “What is Amnesia: Rebirth?” asks Thomas Grip, creative director at Frictional Games, in a PlayStation blog post. “A new protagonist, a new setting, a new story, but built on what we learned from the original game. No gimmicks. No inventing something completely new. This is Amnesia.” The relationship between old and new seems to be a big focus of Frictional’s new game. Grip says that “in horror, repetition is a deadly sin” but notes that Frictional wants to “return to those roots” of the Amnesia franchise. At the same time, Grip writes that “simple horror isn’t enough” and that Frictional “wants to take you beyond horror and out the other side.” Watch the announcement trailer for the game to see what Grip means: In terms of practical information about Amnesia: Rebirth, we really don’t know much. There are a few photos in the blog that hint at what is to come, but Grip didn’t share much about the title beyond those larger goals of what Frictional hopes to accomplish with Amnesia: Rebirth. The creative director notes that Rebirth is not “going for a carnival attraction of jumpscares,” which reinforces the idea that the sequel will build upon the atmospheric dread of the original Amnesia in some way. Frictional returning to the horror franchise that put the studio on the map is a big deal. Amnesia is not just a masterclass in a masterclass of horror game design but it’s arguably one of the most influential and greatest titles of its decade. As Frictional Games points out, Amnesia became an early example of a game that went viral on YouTube and other online outlets. It was so scary that it encouraged people to watch others play it just to see what their reactions to it would be. While Frictional Games went on to release another horror masterpiece, the underrated SOMA, the studio handed development of the second Amnesia title, A Machine for Pigs, off to developer The Chinese Room. A Machine for Pigs was fairly well-received, but some critics noted that it traded the incredible frights of the original in for more opportunities to tell an interesting (but sometimes overbearing) story. It seems that Frictional Games is reassuring players that it plans to undo any negative associations fans who were disappointed with A Machine for Pigs may have with the Amnesia name. We’ll find out more about Amnesia: Rebirth as it nears its release date sometime later this year.

Here are the best deals for true wireless earphones on Amazon right now. True wireless earphones are the present and future of personal audio and listening, and there are some impressive options available to buy right now. The Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2021 has now kicked off, and there are some interesting deals available for po[CENSORED]r true wireless earphones across price ranges. We've compiled a list of the best true wireless earphones deals on Amazon right now, covering brands such as Apple, Samsung, Jabra, Sony, and Realme, and here are our top picks in the segment. Apple AirPods Pro Offering class-leading sound quality and ANC performance, the Apple AirPods Pro are considered to be the best true wireless earphones you can buy right now. Bluetooth connectivity means that the AirPods Pro can be used with just about any smartphone or tablet, but to be able to use all features and customise the controls, you'll need to have an iOS device. The AirPods Pro are priced at Rs. 17,990 down from the usual price of around Rs. 25,000, a significant discount of around Rs. 7,000. Bank offers with HDFC Bank and no-cost EMI schemes are also available, which will make the price a bit more attractive. AirPods Pro here Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro Samsung's flagship true wireless earphones, the Galaxy Buds Pro have a proper in-canal fit and very good active noise cancellation, as well as support for the Scalable advanced Bluetooth codec. The earphones work best with Samsung smartphones thanks to the codec support, and are usefully also IP67 rated for dust and water resistance, making this among the most weather-resistant true wireless headsets you can buy right now. Typically priced at around Rs. 16,000, the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro are available for Rs. 9,990 during the Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2021. Bank offers with HDFC Bank and no-cost EMI schemes are available, too. Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro here Jabra Elite 75t The Jabra Elite 75t isn't the latest flagship product in the company's true wireless headset range, but it remains an excellent option with active noise cancellation, good microphone performance, detailed sound with powerful bass, and decent battery life. The fit and noise isolation are also excellent on this true wireless headset, putting it up against options from other top brands such as Samsung and Sony in the upper mid-range segment. Down from its launch price of Rs. 14,999, the Jabra Elite 75t is available for Rs. 8,999 during the Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2021. Bank offers with HDFC Bank and no-cost EMI schemes can be availed for this. Jabra Elite 75t here Sony WF-XB700 The Sony WF-XB700 is a po[CENSORED]r option among listeners looking for a bass-centric sound signature, thanks to Sony's ‘Extra Bass' tuning. The earphones are IPX4 rated for water resistance, and support the SBC and AAC Bluetooth codecs. Sony's usual attention to tuning and reliable connectivity are also key points that make this headset worth considering. The Sony WF-XB700 true wireless earphones are available for Rs. 6,490 during the Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2021, with bank offers with HDFC Bank and no-cost EMI schemes also available. Sony WF-XB700 here Realme Buds Q2 Among the most affordable true wireless earphones with active noise cancellation, the Realme Buds Q2 represents excellent value for money and a feature set that is typical seen on high-end headsets. There is app support through the Realme Link app, and decent sound and battery life for the price. While already competitively priced before any discounts, the Realme Buds Q2 are available for a very competitive price of Rs. 2,199 during the Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2021. Coupon discounts and bank offers with HDFC Bank apply as well.

Smoother scrolling in Excel at last One of the most frustrating parts of using Microsoft Excel could finally be over thanks to a new update to the software. Microsoft has revealed it will be bringing support for smoother scrolling to its Excel Desktop app, hopefully resulting in a much better user experience. The spreadsheet software update should mean an end to accidentally snapping to random unwanted cells, or losing track of all your vital data in the middle of an important work task. Check out our list of the best productivity software available Here's our list of the best collaboration software out there We've built a list of the best office software on the market Smooth scrolling At the moment, Excel struggles with smooth scrolling, as the software looks to automatically highlight the cell in the top-left of your spreadsheet - an issue Microsoft admits is frustrating, and not particularly easy to fix. "Though you might think this is an easy fix, simply requiring the alteration of a few lines of code, there’s actually a lot more to it," noted Microsoft engineer Steve Kraynak in a blog post outlining the change. "In fact, we learned that this change affects many different aspects of Excel, including freezing panes, resizing rows, cutting and pasting, filtering, cell styles, comments, dragging and filling, and more." The new smoother scrolling update has two parts - firstly, making scrolling smoother when using either the mouse wheel or the scrollbars (with Microsoft noting that touch screen and touch pad already scrolled smoothly). Secondly (and more excitingly) you can now stop scrolling partway through a row or column, with Excel no longer making you go any further than you want. Microsoft notes that users can try out a number of new features thanks to the update, including dragging the scroll bar to see how they can scroll with precision and stop anywhere they like. The feature is available now to Insiders on Windows with Beta Channel or Current Channel Preview with Version 2109 (Build 14430.20000) or later, and be available to all Microsoft 365 Subscribers within the next few months. Microsoft Office 2021 release date, pricing, features and everything else you need to know

Found in Linux drivers. uture AMD processors could be coming with USB4 support and DisplayPort tunneling sometime soon. According to Phoronix, AMD Linux driver engineers are working on a new AMDGPU kernel graphics driver featuring initial support for USB4 DisplayPort tunneling technology. We don't know exactly what architecture will come with USB4, however, rumors are floating around that AMD's Ryzen 6000 series APUs codenamed "Yellow Carp" and "Rembrandt" could feature USB4 connectivity. If so, then AMD will likely be targeting laptops for USB4 adoption first before bringing it over to desktop Ryzen-based CPUs and Radeon RDNA-based graphics cards. Tunneling is a new feature introduced to USB4 that comes from the port's Thunderbolt 3 integration. Tunneling allows multiple protocols, including USB, DisplayPort and PCIe, to all operate at the same time (albeit with reduced bandwidth per protocol). This is different from USB alt mode, which allows only a single protocol to be active at a time. Alt mode can still be useful if you need all of your USB bandwidth targeted towards one protocol, however, tunneling could prove to be more advantageous when you don't need all bandwidth targeted towards one connection (like a USB dock with multiple ports). The new AMDGPU kernel graphics driver is almost ready to be delivered to the public, and according to Phoronix, could be ready in time for Linux 5.16. This could very well mean that AMD is preparing USB 4 support for its next generation of CPUs or GPUs.

The equivalent to found footage films. A follow-up to Sara is Missing mobile game, Simulacra offers an immersive gameplay as it turns your phone into somebody else's. It's almost like you're being immersed into a horror found footage film like the Blair Witch Project. In this game, you found the phone of a girl named Anna, and as you explore its contents you stumble upon a disturbing discovery: Anna is in desperate need of help. Solve the mystery surrounding Anna's disappearance and beat the game. Gameplay: The game is designed to look like Anna's phone, so when you start it up it already gives you the weird sensation of holding a different mobile device even when it is yours you're holding. The IRIS OS of the phone is behaving strangely so you can only access a few apps in the beginning of the game. To uncover the truth behind Anna's whereabouts, you have to piece together the information that you could find within her phone, including her photos, videos, messages, and more. Simulacra is a paid game available at the App Store for iOS users and at the Google Play Store for Android users. Its predecessor, Sara is Missing which offers a similar gameplay is available for free in both stores.

If you’re looking to get spooky in June, there are few options better than Little Nightmares – especially now that it’s free. The adorably grotesque adventure is free-to-keep on Steam this weekend, so if you’re looking to add it to your collection, you should do it fast. (Goodness knows you don’t already have enough free PC games in your library.) Little Nightmares is free for you to claim on the Steam store until Monday, May 30 at 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 6pm BST. You can hit that link and hit the ‘add to account’ button to permanently tie it to your library, and it’ll be available for you to download from then on just as with any game you might purchase for actual money. Plenty of people have been enjoying the promotion, too.steamdb shows a new record concurrent player count today of 78,169, astronomically bigger than the sub-2k player number at launch. Another free giveaway earlier this year brought 19,111 players digging in all at once, so this weekend’s freebie has proven even more po[CENSORED]r. It’s entirely clear why we’re getting regular giveaways of Little Nightmares, but it’s likely got something to do with the release of the sequel earlier this year – enjoy the first and you’ll probably grab the second, right?

The creators known as Marsback have introduced a new, "sweat-proof" gaming mouse called the Zephyr Pro. Zephyr Pro is a fairly unremarkable looking gaming mouse with the necessary RGB backlighting and a "breathable" case to reduce weight and increase airflow. The main band of RGB lighting runs along the bottom edge of the mouse. Pro doesn't expand on the input capabilities of its predecessor, last year's Zephyr. There's still the standard arrangement of two side buttons and one top button for DPI sensitivity control. The design is understandably lightweight, but not the cheapest. The main change is in the operation of the fan itself. On the original Zephyr, users occasionally turned it off due to noise and vibration, but in the Pro both have been greatly reduced. It's not completely silent, but unlike the previous version, it's hard to hear over the hum of a regular PC or laptop. According to the manufacturer, a quieter fan doesn't mean less cooling power. The fan now points straight up instead of at a 45 degree angle, which seems to make a difference. You shouldn't expect to feel like your palm is being blown around by an air conditioner, but the overall cooling effect is palpable. Zephyr Pro has built-in memory and software to customize button functionality and RGB backlighting with ample options. Surprisingly, there is no ability to adjust the fan speed here - it simply turns on and off with a button on the bottom of the mouse. The Zephyr Pro is priced at $59 on the manufacturer's website at . But there's an additional $10 discount for first-time buyers of something from Marsback. Source: marsback

Researchers at Caltech have built a bipedal robot that combines walking with flying to create a new type of locomotion, making it exceptionally nimble and capable of complex movements. Part walking robot, part flying drone, the newly developed LEONARDO (short for LEgs ONboARD drOne, or LEO for short) can walk a slackline, hop, and even ride a skateboard. Developed by a team at Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST), LEO is the first robot that uses multi-joint legs and propeller-based thrusters to achieve a fine degree of control over its balance. A paper about the LEO robot was published online on October 6 and was featured on the October 2021 cover of Science Robotics. "We drew inspiration from nature. Think about the way birds are able to flap and hop to navigate telephone lines," says Soon-Jo Chung, corresponding author and Bren Professor of Aerospace and Control and Dynamical Systems. "A complex yet intriguing behavior happens as birds move between walking and flying. We wanted to understand and learn from that." "There is a similarity between how a human wearing a jet suit controls their legs and feet when landing or taking off and how LEO uses synchronized control of distributed propeller-based thrusters and leg joints," Chung adds. "We wanted to study the interface of walking and flying from the dynamics and control standpoint." Bipedal robots are able to tackle complex real-world terrains by using the same sort of movements that humans use, like jumping or running or even climbing stairs, but they are stymied by rough terrain. Flying robots easily navigate tough terrain by simply avoiding the ground, but they face their own set of limitations: High energy consumption during flight and limited payload capacity. "Robots with a multimodal locomotion ability are able to move through challenging environments more efficiently than traditional robots by appropriately switching between their available means of movement. In particular, LEO aims to bridge the gap between the two disparate domains of aerial and bipedal locomotion that are not typically intertwined in existing robotic systems," says Kyunam Kim, postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and co-lead author of the Science Robotics paper. By using a hybrid movement that is somewhere between walking and flying, the researchers get the best of both worlds in terms of locomotion. LEO's lightweight legs take stress off of its thrusters by supporting the bulk of the weight, but because the thrusters are controlled synchronously with leg joints, LEO has uncanny balance. "Based on the types of obstacles it needs to traverse, LEO can choose to use either walking or flying, or blend the two as needed. In addition, LEO is capable of performing unusual locomotion maneuvers that even in humans require a mastery of balance, like walking on a slackline and skateboarding," says Patrick Spieler, co-lead author of the Science Robotics paper and a former member of Chung's group who is currently with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech for NASA. LEO stands 2.5 feet tall and is equipped with two legs that have three actuated joints, along with four propeller thrusters mounted at an angle at the robot's shoulders. When a person walks, they adjust the position and orientation of their legs to cause their center of mass to move forward while the body's balance is maintained. LEO walks in this way as well: The propellers ensure that the robot is upright as it walks, and the leg actuators change the position of the legs to move the robot's center of mass forward through the use of a synchronized walking and flying controller. In flight, the robot uses its propellers alone and flies like a drone. "Because of its propellers, you can poke or prod LEO with a lot of force without actually knocking the robot over," says Elena-Sorina Lupu (MS '21), graduate student at Caltech and co-author of the Science Robotics paper. The LEO project was started in the summer of 2019 with the authors of the Science Robotics paper and three Caltech undergraduates who participated in the project through the Institute's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. Next, the team plans to improve the performance of LEO by creating a more rigid leg design that is capable of supporting more of the robot's weight and increasing the thrust force of the propellers. In addition, they hope to make LEO more autonomous so that the robot can understand how much of its weight is supported by legs and how much needs to be supported by propellers when walking on uneven terrain. The researchers also plan to equip LEO with a newly developed drone landing control algorithm that utilizes deep neural networks. With a better understanding of the environment, LEO could make its own decisions about the best combination of walking, flying, or hybrid motion that it should use to move from one place to another based on what is safest and what uses the least amount of energy. "Right now, LEO uses propellers to balance during walking, which means it uses energy fairly inefficiently. We are planning to improve the leg design to make LEO walk and balance with minimal aid of propellers," says Lupu, who will continue working on LEO throughout her Ph.D. program. In the real world, the technology designed for LEO could foster the development of adaptive landing gear systems composed of controlled leg joints for aerial robots and other types of flying vehicles. The team envisions that future Mars rotorcraft could be equipped with legged landing gear so that the body balance of these aerial robots can be maintained as they land on sloped or uneven terrains, thereby reducing the risk of failure under challenging landing conditions.

New fab will go to Europe instead Intel boss Pat Gelsinger has announced in an interview with the BBC that a potential new chip fab will no longer be built in Britain citing Brexit as the reason for the decision. Instead it looks as though a European country will host Intel's fab. Before the United Kingdom made its decision to exit the European Union by a tiny margin in a 2016 referendum, it "would have been a site that we would have considered,” according to Gelsinger. “Post-Brexit,” he added, “we now have about 70 proposals for sites across Europe from maybe 10 different countries. We're hopeful that we'll get to agreement on a site, as well as support from the EU... before the end of this year." Intel’s interest in building a new plant has only strengthened following the worldwide chip shortage that has seen prices pushed up for products such as GPUs and processors used in new cars. The US firm hopes to invest $95bn (£70bn) on new and upgraded chip plants in Europe over the next ten years. "Just everything is short right now. And even as I and my peers in the industry are working like crazy to catch up, it's going to be a while," Gelsinger said. That spending matches that of Intel’s rivals in the chip-fabrication market, with Taiwan-based TSMC, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of microchips, spending $100bn over three years, and Samsung putting $205bn into its own semiconductor plants. Intel currently outsources some of its chip manufacturing, but hopes to take it in-house with the development of new plants. "It is clearly part of the motivation of a globally balanced supply chain that nobody should be too dependent on somebody else," Gelsinger told the BBC.

Today is my brother @«MOGREM»( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)♛ is birthday. I hope this is a happy year for you I tried to bring you something cool and like you for your birthday this year, but I couldn't come I wish you success in your life and the fulfillment of all your desires happy birth day #Regards

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Because it's Slender Man. From its humble beginnings as a creepypasta content, Slender Man has become a famous figure in video games, and you just can't miss facing him on your mobile, that's why we recommend Slender Man Origins 3: Abandoned School. Years after an ordinary school closed down because of missing children, a young woman is lured to return only to find out that the Slender Man still lurks underneath its shadows. Gameplay: You have to explore the school to free the souls of the missing children from the Slender Man. Pick up keys, solve puzzles, and uncover the truth behind the items of the abandoned school. The game is also accompanied by a creepy soundtrack that completes the scary atmosphere of the whole game. Slender Man Origins 3: Abandoned School is available for free at the Download for Android users and for purchase at the App Store for iOS users.

The exploration-focused game is set to graduate from Early Access. Exclusion zone-based survival horror game Chernobylite has been on our radar for a few years now, but its development foray in Early Access is coming to a close this July as The Farm 51 take it into a full release. It's a game about the Chernobyl incident in the vein of the STALKER series, but has the protagonist as an ex-worker at the nuclear power plant who's trying to unravel a mystery and find their beloved, who has disappeared. The game's main schtick is that it's a non-linear, exploration focused, survival horror game. Choices made in play are linked to and have consequences on story events hours later, as well as changing the Zone around you. There are multiple stories in the game, and several alternate endings along the branched paths of the main plot, which pits you against both supernatural horrors and the military trying to cover them up. It's also a crafting RPG, where you need to build a team of companions and keep them together and well-supplied in order to get what you need. These companions can die, or even turn against you, if the description is anything to go by. Chernobylite is made by The Farm 51, who also developed Get Even and World War 3. It has been in development since late 2019 and is now scheduled for a July 2021 release. You can find Chernobylite on Steam.

Here are the best deals for headphones and earphones on Amazon right now. The Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2021 has kicked off, and buyers looking for new headphones or earphones have plenty of great deals to choose from. We've compiled a list of headphones, earphones, and true wireless earphones which are available at discounted prices during the Great Indian Festival sale, including options from brands such as Sony, Redmi, Jabra, Realme, and Xiaomi. Our selections cover both wired and wireless connectivity, across various price segments and feature sets. Here are our top picks for the best deals on audio products. Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Active Noise Cancelling Headphones Widely regarded as one of the best wireless headphones you can buy right now, the Sony WH-1000XM4 has class-leading active noise cancellation and battery life, and very good sound quality. The headphones support the LDAC Bluetooth codec, and also have app support. The Sony headphones are priced at Rs. 22,990 during the Amazon Great Indian Festival sale, considerably discounted from the usual price of Rs. 29,990. Bank offers with HDFC Bank and no-cost EMI schemes are available as well. Mi Dual-Driver Wired Earphones Among the best affordable wired earphones you can buy right now, the Mi Dual-Driver Earphones have a dual-driver setup with 10mm and 8mm dynamic drivers, and classic 3.5mm connectivity. Although bass can sometimes feel a bit much, the earphones represent excellent value for money. Although ordinarily priced at Rs. 799, the Mi Dual-Driver Wired Earphones are available for Rs. 599 during the Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2021. Bank offers are available from HDFC Bank as well. Redmi Earbuds 3 Pro Xiaomi's Redmi brand is well known for its value-driven approach to its products, and the Redmi Earbuds 3 Pro offer a lot for the price. The earphones have a dual-driver setup and support for the aptX series of Bluetooth codecs, offering decent sound and battery life. Although the standard pricing of Rs. 2,999 applies during the Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2021, the Redmi Earbuds 3 Pro does have coupon discounts and bank offers with HDFC Bank, that make the purchase more attractive. Jabra Elite 75t The newer Jabra Elite 85t has launched, but the Elite 75t is still an excellent pair of true wireless earphones. The headset has active noise cancellation, excellent microphone and sound performance, and a very good fit. Battery life on the earphones is decent as well. The Jabra Elite 75t is available at a discounted price of Rs. 7,999 during the Amazon Great Indian Festival sale, considerably lower than its launch price of Rs. 14,999. This makes it among the best true wireless earphones with ANC under Rs. 10,000 right now. Realme Buds Q2 Among the most affordable true wireless headsets with active noise cancellation that you can buy right now, the Realme Buds Q2 also has app support through the excellent Realme Link app, and USB Type-C fast charging. The headset is among the most feature-filled and value-driven true wireless options you can buy right now. At a discounted price of Rs. 2,199 during the Amazon Great Indian Festival Sale 2021, the earphones also have coupon discounts and bank offers from HDFC Bank to further sweeten the deal.

Researchers at Heidelberg University and University of Bern have recently devised a technique to achieve fast and energy-efficient computing using spiking neuromorphic substrates. This strategy, introduced in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, is a rigorous adaptation of a time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding scheme, together with a corresponding learning rule implemented on certain networks of artificial neurons. TTFS is a time-coding approach, in which the activity of neurons is inversely proportional to their firing delay. "A few years ago, I started my Master's thesis in the Electronic Vision(s) group in Heidelberg," Julian Goeltz, one of the leading researchers working on the study, told TechXplore. "The neuromorphic BrainScaleS system developed there promised to be an intriguing substrate for brain-like computation, given how its neuron and synapse circuits mimic the dynamics of neurons and synapses in the brain." When Goeltz started studying in Heidelberg, deep-learning models for spiking networks were still relatively unexplored and existing approaches did not use spike-based communication between neurons very effectively. In 2017, Hesham Mostafa, a researcher at University of California—San Diego, introduced the idea that the timing of individual neuronal spikes could be used for information processing. However, the neuronal dynamics he outlined in his paper were still quite different from biological ones and thus were not applicable to brain-inspired neuromorphic hardware. "We therefore needed to come up with a hardware-compatible variant of error backpropagation, the algorithm underlying the modern AI revolution, for single spike times," Goeltz explained. "The difficulty lay in the rather complicated relationship between synaptic inputs and outputs of spiking neurons." Initially, Goeltz and his colleagues set out to develop a mathematical framework that could be used to approach the problem of achieving deep learning based on temporal coding in spiking neural networks. Their goal was to then transfer this approach and the results they gathered onto the BrainScaleS system, a renowned neuromorphic computing system that emulates models of neurons, synapses, and brain plasticity. "Assume that we have a layered network in which the input layer receives an image, and after several layers of processing the topmost layer needs to recognize the image as being a cat or a dog," Laura Kriener, the second lead researcher for the study, told TechXplore. "If the image was a cat, but the 'dog' neuron in the top layer became active, the network needs to learn that its answer was wrong. In other words, the network needs to change connections—i.e., synapses—between the neurons in such a way that the next time it sees the same picture, the 'dog' neuron stays silent and the 'cat' neuron is active." The problem described by Kriener and addressed in the recent paper, known as the 'credit assignment problem," essentially entails understanding which synapses in a neural network are responsible for a network's output or prediction, and how much of the credit each synapse should take for a given prediction. To identify what synapses were involved in a network's wrong prediction and fix the issue, researchers often use the so-called error backpropagation algorithm. This algorithm works by propagating an error in the topmost layer of a neural network back through the network, to inform synapses about their own contribution to this error and change each of them accordingly. When neurons in a network communicate via spikes, each input spike 'bumps' the potential of a neuron up or down. The size of this 'bump' depends on the weight of a given synapse, known as 'synaptic weight." "If enough upward bumps accumulate, the neuron 'fires'—it sends out a spike of its own to its partners," Kriener said. "Our framework effectively tells a synapse exactly how to change its weight to achieve a particular output spike time, given the timing errors of the neurons in the layers above, similarly to the backpropagation algorithm, but for spiking neurons. This way, the entire spiking activity of a network can be shaped in the desired way—which, in the example above, would cause the 'cat' neuron to fire early and the 'dog' neuron to stay silent or fire later." Due to its spike-based nature and to the hardware used to implement it, the framework developed by Goeltz, Kriener and their colleagues exhibits remarkable speed and efficiency. Moreover, the framework encourages neurons to spike as quickly as possible and only once. Therefore, the flow of information is both quick and sparse, as very little data needs to flow through a given neural network to enable it to complete a task. "The BrainScaleS hardware further amplifies these features, as its neuron dynamics are extremely fast—1000 times faster than those in the brain—which translates to a correspondingly higher information processing speed," Kriener explained. "Furthermore, the silicon neurons and synapses are designed to consume very little power during their operation, which brings about the energy efficiency of our neuromorphic networks." The findings could have important implications for both research and development. In addition to informing further studies, they could, in fact, pave the way toward the development of faster and more efficient neuromorphic computing tools. "With respect to information processing in the brain, one longstanding question is: Why do neurons in our brains communicate with spikes? Or in other words, why has evolution favored this form of communication?" M. A. Petrovici, the senior researcher for the study, told TechXplore. "In principle, this might simply be a contingency of cellular biochemistry, but we suggest that a sparse and fast spike-based information processing scheme such as ours provides an argument for the functional superiority of spikes." The researchers also evaluated their framework in a series of systematic robustness tests. Remarkably, they found that their model is well-suited for imperfect and diverse neural substrates, which would resemble those in the human cortex, where no two neurons are identical, as well as hardware with variations in its components. "Our demonstrated combination of high speed and low power comes, we believe, at an opportune time, considering recent developments in chip design," Petrovici explained. "While on modern processors the number of transistors still increases roughly exponentially (Moore's law), the raw processing speed as measured by the clock frequency has stagnated in the mid-2000s, mainly due to the high power dissipation and the high operating temperatures that ariseas a consequence. Furthermore, modern processors still essentially rely on a von-Neumann architecture, with a central processing unit and a separate memory, between which information needs to flow for each processing step in an algorithm." In neural networks, memories or data are stored within the processing units themselves; that is, within neurons and synapses. This can significantly increase the efficiency of a system's information flow. As a consequence of this greater efficiency in information storage and processing, the framework developed by this team of researchers consumes comparatively little power. Therefore, it could prove particularly valuable for edge computing applications such as nanosatellites or wearable devices, where the available power budget is not sufficient to support the operations and requirements of modern microprocessors. So far, Goeltz, Kriener, Petrovici and their colleagues ran their framework using a platform for basic neuromorphic research, which thus prioritizes model flexibility over efficiency. In the future, they would like to implement their framework on custom-designed neuromorphic chips, as this could allow them to further improve its performance. "Apart from the possibility of building specialized hardware using our design strategy, we plan to pursue two further research questions," Goeltz said. "First, we would like to extend our neuromorphic implementation to online and embedded learning." For the purpose of this recent study, the network developed by the researchers was trained offline, on a pre-recorded dataset. However, the team would like to also test it in real-world scenarios where a computer is expected to learn how to complete a task on the fly by analyzing online data collected by a device, robot or satellite. "To achieve this, we aim to harness the plasticity mechanisms embedded on-chip," Goeltz explained. "Instead of having a host computer calculate the synaptic changes during learning, we want to enable each synapse to compute and enact these changes on its own, using only locally available information. In our paper, we describe some early ideas towards achieving this goal." In their future work, Goeltz, Kriener, Petrovici and their colleagues would also like to extend their framework so that it can process spatiotemporal data. To do this, they would need to also train it on time-varying data, such as audio or video recordings. "While our model is, in principle, suited to shape the spiking activity in a network in arbitrary ways, the specific implementation of spike-based error propagation during temporal sequence learning remains an open research question," Kriener added.

Cheap Xbox Series X|S storage upgrades possible with conversion adapter. A Chinese company has released a conversion adapter that lets you install select M.2-2230 SSDs into the Microsoft's Xbox Series X and S game console expansion slots, reports Hermitage Akihabara. The tiny device enables cheap storage upgrades for Microsoft's latest gaming machines and breaks Seagate's monopoly on Xbox Series X and S storage expansion cards. Sintech's DIY CFexpress Card PA-CFEM2-C conversion adapter can house an M.2-2230 NVMe SSD and connect it to a CFexpress Type-B interface. The unit is marketed specifically for Microsoft's latest game consoles. However, you can also use it to make your own CFexpress Type-B card for use with professional DSLR cameras and appropriate card readers. The adapter costs $29.99. The adaptor has a major limitation, though. While it can house any short M.2-2230 drive with a PCIe interface, the consoles are only compatible with select SSDs featuring a specific firmware and internal format. For example, Western Digital's WD Blue CH SN530 is naturally compatible with Microsoft's consoles, but the WD Blue PC SN530 is not. This could be why you can't use typical CFexpress 1.0 Type-B cards to expand the storage in Microsoft's consoles. Unfortunately, it's currently unclear how many SSDs are on the market that fit these specific requirements. Microsoft's latest Xbox Series X|S game consoles use proprietary storage expansion cards that come in CFexpress 1.0 Type-B form-factor and use two PCIe Gen4 lanes (as opposed to two PCIe Gen3 lanes mandated by the CFexpress 1.0 Type-B specification). Since these cards are currently only made by Seagate, they are quite expensive — they currently cost around $220 for a 1TB version. However, as proven by an enthusiast, it is possible to build an expansion drive for the latest Xboxes using a CFexpress to M.2-2230 adapter (which was designed to build higher-capacity storage devices for cameras) and a compatible SSD.

A dark and eerie platformer. "Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters Limbo." This game offers dark and eerie sceneries where you play the role of a nameless boy who will have to face the dangerous creatures and traps set up within the Limbo. If the idea of a young child being trapped in such a dismal place doesn't creep you out, then the giant spiders might do the job! Gameplay: Limbo offers players stunning visuals in black and white. It has simple controls where you navigate the character forward and backward, and make your character interact with the objects that you encounter. Your environment is the puzzle of the game. You have to use the objects around you in order to get through the obstacles. Of course, dangers lurk in the form of traps and monsters and not even a boy already in Limbo can survive a direct attack. Limbo is a paid game available at the APP Sore for iOS users, and Google Play Store for Android users. You can also check out the Free Demo for Android.

It’s Halloween month and a new indie horror game has been announced, and it’s something a little different – and terrifying. Choo-Choo Charles from Two Star Games is a game about maintaining a train and using it to fight an evil murderous clown-faced spider-train that wants to eat you. It’s Stephen King’s It meets Thomas the Tank Engine. Every time a game gets released with mod support, the first thing that gets added is a Thomas the Tank Engine mod – it’s like a running joke at this point, but some are scarier than others. Two Star seems to have taken this murderous train concept and mixed it with the final clown-spider form of Pennywise in Stephen King’s It – with a bit of another lesser-known King monster in there too, Charlie The Choo-Choo. As for the game itself – which is available to wishlist on Steam with a release date of Q1 2022 – Choo-Choo Charles is a first-person horror game set on an island where players are continually stalked by the spider-train Charles. The goal of the game is to take on quests for the terrified inhabitants, upgrade your own yellow train with weapons and armour, and eventually take on Charles in a battle to the death. Players can get off the train and explore on foot, but that’s probably not a wise idea as the trailer below shows. We blame Skyrim for the rise of monster trains in games, but it’s fun to see a developer run with it to create an original-looking horror game – and we thought The Grudge with cats was unique. Choo-Choo Charles is out next year, although sadly it doesn’t have a demo in Steam Next Fest – which is going on right now. Get involved in the conversation by heading over to our Facebook and Instagram pages. To stay up to date with the latest PC gaming guides, news, and reviews, follow PCGamesN on Twitter and Steam News Hub, or download our free app for Overwolf. We sometimes include relevant affiliate links in articles from which we earn a small commission. For more information

When it comes to games such as chess or Go, artificial intelligence (AI) programs have far surpassed the best players in the world. These "superhuman" AIs are unmatched competitors, but perhaps harder than competing against humans is collaborating with them. Can the same technology get along with people? In a new study, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers sought to find out how well humans could play the cooperative card game Hanabi with an advanced AI model trained to excel at playing with teammates it had never met before. In single-blind experiments, participants played two series of the game: One with the AI agent as their teammate, and the other with a rule-based agent, a bot manually programmed to play in a predefined way. The results surprised the researchers. Not only were the scores no better with the AI teammate than with the rule-based agent, but humans consistently hated playing with their AI teammate. They found it to be unpredictable, unreliable, and untrustworthy, and felt negatively even when the team scored well. A paper detailing this study has been accepted to the 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). "It really highlights the nuanced distinction between creating AI that performs objectively well and creating AI that is subjectively trusted or preferred," says Ross Allen, co-author of the paper and a researcher in the Artificial Intelligence Technology Group. "It may seem those things are so close that there's not really daylight between them, but this study showed that those are actually two separate problems. We need to work on disentangling those." Humans hating their AI teammates could be of concern for researchers designing this technology to one day work with humans on real challenges—like defending from missiles or performing complex surgery. This dynamic, called teaming intelligence, is a next frontier in AI research, and it uses a particular kind of AI called reinforcement learning. A reinforcement learning AI is not told which actions to take, but instead discovers which actions yield the most numerical "reward" by trying out scenarios again and again. It is this technology that has yielded the superhuman chess and Go players. Unlike rule-based algorithms, these AI aren't programmed to follow "if/then" statements, because the possible outcomes of the human tasks they're slated to tackle, like driving a car, are far too many to code. "Reinforcement learning is a much more general-purpose way of developing AI. If you can train it to learn how to play the game of chess, that agent won't necessarily go drive a car. But you can use the same algorithms to train a different agent to drive a car, given the right data," Allen says. "The sky's the limit in what it could, in theory, do." Bad hints, bad plays Today, researchers are using Hanabi to test the performance of reinforcement learning models developed for collaboration, in much the same way that chess has served as a benchmark for testing competitive AI for decades. The game of Hanabi is akin to a multiplayer form of Solitaire. Players work together to stack cards of the same suit in order. However, players may not view their own cards, only the cards that their teammates hold. Each player is strictly limited in what they can communicate to their teammates to get them to pick the best card from their own hand to stack next. The Lincoln Laboratory researchers did not develop either the AI or rule-based agents used in this experiment. Both agents represent the best in their fields for Hanabi performance. In fact, when the AI model was previously paired with an AI teammate it had never played with before, the team achieved the highest-ever score for Hanabi play between two unknown AI agents. "That was an important result," Allen says. "We thought, if these AI that have never met before can come together and play really well, then we should be able to bring humans that also know how to play very well together with the AI, and they'll also do very well. That's why we thought the AI team would objectively play better, and also why we thought that humans would prefer it, because generally we'll like something better if we do well." Neither of those expectations came true. Objectively, there was no statistical difference in the scores between the AI and the rule-based agent. Subjectively, all 29 participants reported in surveys a clear preference toward the rule-based teammate. The participants were not informed which agent they were playing with for which games. "One participant said that they were so stressed out at the bad play from the AI agent that they actually got a headache," says Jaime Pena, a researcher in the AI Technology and Systems Group and an author on the paper. "Another said that they thought the rule-based agent was dumb but workable, whereas the AI agent showed that it understood the rules, but that its moves were not cohesive with what a team looks like. To them, it was giving bad hints, making bad plays." Inhuman creativity This perception of AI making "bad plays" links to surprising behavior researchers have observed previously in reinforcement learning work. For example, in 2016, when DeepMind's AlphaGo first defeated one of the world's best Go players, one of the most widely praised moves made by AlphaGo was move 37 in game 2, a move so unusual that human commentators thought it was a mistake. Later analysis revealed that the move was actually extremely well-calculated, and was described as "genius." Such moves might be praised when an AI opponent performs them, but they're less likely to be celebrated in a team setting. The Lincoln Laboratory researchers found that strange or seemingly illogical moves were the worst offenders in breaking humans' trust in their AI teammate in these closely coupled teams. Such moves not only diminished players' perception of how well they and their AI teammate worked together, but also how much they wanted to work with the AI at all, especially when any potential payoff wasn't immediately obvious. "There was a lot of commentary about giving up, comments like "I hate working with this thing,'" adds Hosea Siu, also an author of the paper and a researcher in the Control and Autonomous Systems Engineering Group. Participants who rated themselves as Hanabi experts, which the majority of players in this study did, more often gave up on the AI player. Siu finds this concerning for AI developers, because key users of this technology will likely be domain experts. "Let's say you train up a super-smart AI guidance assistant for a missile defense scenario. You aren't handing it off to a trainee; you're handing it off to your experts on your ships who have been doing this for 25 years. So, if there is a strong expert bias against it in gaming scenarios, it's likely going to show up in real-world ops," he adds. Squishy humans The researchers note that the AI used in this study wasn't developed for human preference. But, that's part of the problem—not many are. Like most collaborative AI models, this model was designed to score as high as possible, and its success has been benchmarked by its objective performance. If researchers don't focus on the question of subjective human preference, "then we won't create AI that humans actually want to use," Allen says. "It's easier to work on AI that improves a very clean number. It's much harder to work on AI that works in this mushier world of human preferences." Solving this harder problem is the goal of the MeRLin (Mission-Ready Reinforcement Learning) project, which this experiment was funded under in Lincoln Laboratory's Technology Office, in collaboration with the U.S. Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator and the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The project is studying what has prevented collaborative AI technology from leaping out of the game space and into messier reality. The researchers think that the ability for the AI to explain its actions will engender trust. This will be the focus of their work for the next year. "You can imagine we rerun the experiment, but after the fact—and this is much easier said than done—the human could ask, 'Why did you do that move, I didn't understand it?' If the AI could provide some insight into what they thought was going to happen based on their actions, then our hypothesis is that humans would say, 'Oh, weird way of thinking about it, but I get it now,' and they'd trust it. Our results would totally change, even though we didn't change the underlying decision-making of the AI," Allen says. Like a huddle after a game, this kind of exchange is often what helps humans build camaraderie and cooperation as a team. "Maybe it's also a staffing bias. Most AI teams don't have people who want to work on these squishy humans and their soft problems," Siu adds, laughing. "It's people who want to do math and optimization. And that's the basis, but that's not enough." Mastering a game such as Hanabi between AI and humans could open up a universe of possibilities for teaming intelligence in the future. But until researchers can close the gap between how well an AI performs and how much a human likes it, the technology may well remain at machine versus human.

New info on the initial DDR5 offerings By now, it's common knowledge that Intel's 12th Generation Alder Lake will be the first mainstream processor platform to embrace DDR5 memory. The chipmaker (via momomo_us) has released a new document that lists the different DDR5-4800 memory modules that have been validated for its next-generation platform. Perhaps one of these models will land the first DDR5 spot on our best RAM list. Instead of validating the different DDR5 products itself, Intel delegated the arduous task to Advanced Validation Labs, Inc (AVL), a renowned specialist in testing and validating memory during the pre- or post-production phase. The company specifically concentrated on DDR5-4800 memory, which is the baseline standard for Alder Lake. These are non-ECC memory modules that stick to JEDEC's guidelines, including a 1.1V DRAM voltage and mediocre 40-39-39 timings. AVL tested memory modules from big-name vendors, such as SK hynix, Sasmsung, Micron, Crucial and Kingston. While the data rate remains the same for all the candidates, the capacities vary between 8GB and 32GB per memory module. According to the Intel document, DRAM manufacturers will start with 16-gigabit DDR5 RAM chips. so there's enough headroom to work up to the capacity that they want to offer for each individual memory module. Advertisement One of the novelties with DDR5 is the onboard voltage regulation, which is achieved by equipping the memory module with a power management integrated circuit (PMIC). As far as the initial DDR5 memory modules are concerned, they'll leverage a PMIC from Renesas. The document didn't specify the exact model of the PMIC. However, we think it might be the P8911, which is an optimized version of the P8900 that Renesas designed for server memory. SK hynix, Samsung and Micron are IC manufacturers, so naturally they'll utilize their own ICs in their DDR5 products. Kingston, on the other hand, will tap SK hynix for its ICs/ Meanwhile Crucial, which is Micron's consumer brand, will utilize the latter's ICs. If we look at the ICs, it would seem that SK hynix and Micron will be bringing their respective M-die and A-dies to DDR5. These scale good enough with higher voltages, but they aren't exactly recognized for operating with tight timings. That's where Samsung' B-die ICs excelled back in the DDR4 days. The document confirms that Samsung's DDR5 ICs are Revision B, so these should be B-die. If the DDR5 B-dies are anything like the previous DDR4 B-dies, they'll probably become the de facto ICs for overclockers again. Apparently, the recipe doesn't vary with 8GB and 16GB memory modules, regardless of the brand. The companies will stick with a single-rank design, 1Rx16 for 8GB and 1Rx8 for 16GB. In comparison, 16GB DDR4 used to be a guarantee for dual-rank in the beginning. Eventually, many memory brands have transitioned to a single-rank design thanks to the introduction of higher-density chips. With DDR5, however, 32GB memory modules are the only surefire ticket for a dual-rank (2Rx8) layout. Why does the above matter? Dual-rank memory is typically faster than single-rank memory, although not in all workloads. Both Intel's Core and AMD's Ryzen processors benefit from dual-rank memory, and tests have shown that four memory ranks is the ideal configuration for maximum performance. It remains to be seen whether Alder Lake favors the same setup, though.