“You can catch a glimpse of the hyperrealistic future of computer graphics in the latest update of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, one of the most widely used platforms for developing video games. Beyond the graphics, the increasing sophistication and ease of use offered by platforms like this are making it easier than ever for small game studios and independent filmmakers to create realistic digital worlds.”
From Freethink.
“As AI continues to grow, experts say that the wine industry is proof that businesses can integrate the technology efficiently to supplement labor without displacing a workforce. New agricultural tech like AI can help farmers to cut back on waste, and to run more efficient and sustainable vineyards by monitoring water use and helping determine when and where to use products like fertilizers or pest control. AI-backed tractors and irrigation systems, farmer say, can minimize water use by analyzing soil or vines, while also helping farmers to manage acres of vineyards by providing more accurate data on the health of a crop or what a season’s yield will be.
Other facets of the wine industry have also started adopting the tech, from using generative AI to create custom wine labels to turning to ChatGPT to develop, label and price an entire bottle.”
From Associated Press.
“AI-enabled horticulture will be on display at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. Garden designer Tom Massey and architect Je Ahn will helm the Avanade ‘Intelligent’ Garden, which uses sensors and AI to track plant welfare. Based on the theme of an urban forest, the garden will contain tree species with various horticultural requirements. Sensors measure characteristics such as soil moisture, the movement of sap in tree trunks, and the amount of light filtering through canopies — ‘things that a human gardener wouldn’t be able to see in real time,’ says Massey.
AI will help gardeners make sense of this data via a text interface similar to a chatbot, which visitors will be able to see on screens inside a mycelium-covered pavilion. ‘You’ll be able to have a conversation with the tree and say, ‘What do you need?’ or ‘How are you feeling?’ says Massey. ‘And the tree will respond.’
The idea is that this kind of data gathering and feedback makes for more efficient allocation of increasingly precious resources such as water. It should also improve plant resilience; one in 10 urban trees dies within a year of planting, says Ahn, and by the time you notice wilting branches and crispy leaves it may be too late. Massey hopes data from the show garden could feed into an app that home gardeners would use to track the health of their own plants. Users could manually input data, such as when they last watered a plant, to keep tabs on its condition.”
From Financial Times.
“Board games have long fascinated artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers. They have clear rules, well-defined playing fields and objective winners and losers. This makes them perfect “sandpits” for training AI software. Sometimes, though, their rules contain glitches. Aficionados of Go will be familiar with ko fights—situations in which the basic rule set would permit a game to carry on for ever, and for which an exception had to be created. Avoiding similar problems in newly invented games is something AI can help with.
That, at least, is the experience of Alan Wallat, a board-game designer from London. His latest offering is Sirius Smugglers, in which interstellar merchants try to make an illicit profit. In the olden days, checking its rules would have involved lots of tests by human players, who would probably have wanted to be paid—in beer, perhaps, if not in cash.
Instead, he took his brainchild to Tabletop R&D, an AI startup, where a game-playing algorithm allowed him to play thousands of times in the blink of an eye. He was then able to scan the results for irregularities, statistical biases and any features that were under- or over-used.”
From The Economist.
“Airplanes today fly no faster than they did in the 1970s. In many countries, road speeds have decreased. Flying cars never showed up. In developed countries, the tallest buildings have only inched higher. Most rich countries produce less energy per capita than they did 20 years ago, and the cost of building new physical infrastructure like railways seems to rise inexorably. Yet cruise ships continue to grow: a natural experiment in what can be achieved outside the constraints that have stifled progress on dry land…
Since the SS Great Eastern in 1858, the gross tonnage of the largest passenger ships has grown an average of 1.59 percent per year, nearly double the 0.84 percent annual growth rate in the height of the world’s tallest buildings between the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and the Burj Khalifa in 2010. If we restrict ourselves to the tallest buildings in the United States in the last century, from the completion of the Empire State Building in 1931 to the One World Trade Center in 2020, the record of tallest building has only inched up at 0.24 percent a year.”
From Works in Progress.
