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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Nintendo Switch | $52.95 Buy-Now!

The open-world adventure from Bethesda Game Studios where you can virtually be anyone and do anything, now allows you to go anywhere at home and on the go

New features include motion controls, gear based on the Legend of Zelda series, and amiibo compatibility

Dragons, long lost to the passages of the Elder Scrolls, have returned and the future of Skyrim hangs in the balance

As Dragonborn, the prophesized hero born with the power of The Voice, you are the only one who can stand against them

Live another life, in another world from battling ancient dragons, exploring rugged mountains, building a home, or mastering hundreds of weapons, spells and abilities

Quantum RAM: Modelling the big questions with the very small

Griffith’s Professor Geoff Pryde, who led the project, says that such processes could be simulated using a “quantum hard drive”, much smaller than the memory required for conventional simulations.

“Stephen Hawking once stated that the 21st century is the ‘century of complexity’, as many of today’s most pressing problems, such as understanding climate change or designing transportation system, involve huge networks of interacting components,” he says.

“Their simulation is thus immensely challenging, requiring storage of unprecedented amounts of data. What our experiments demonstrate is a solution may come from quantum theory, by encoding this data into a quantum system, such as the quantum states of light.”

Einstein once said that “God does not play dice with the universe,” voicing his disdain with the idea that quantum particles contain intrinsic randomness.

“But theoretical studies showed that this intrinsic randomness is just the right ingredient needed to reduce the memory cost for modelling partially random statistics,” says Dr Mile Gu, a member of the team who developed the initial theory.

In contrast with the usual binary storage system - the zeroes and ones of bits - quantum bits can be simultaneously 0 and 1, a phenomenon known as quantum superposition.

The researchers, in their paper published in Science Advances, say this freedom allows quantum computers to store many different states of the system being simulated in different superpositions, using less memory overall than in a classical computer.

The team constructed a proof-of-principle quantum simulator using a photon - a single particle of light - interacting with another photon.

They measured the memory requirements of this simulator, and compared it with the fundamental memory requirements of a classical simulator, when used to simulate specified partly random processes.

The data showed that the quantum system could complete the task with much less information stored than the classical computer- a factor of 20 improvements at the best point.

“Although the system was very small - even the ordinary simulation required only a single bit of memory - it proved that quantum advantages can be achieved,” Pryde says.

“Theoretically, large improvements can also be realized for much more complex simulations, and one of the goals of this research program is to advance the demonstrations to more complex problems.”

Griffith University

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techscales-blog

7 years ago

Part Of The Reason I Maintain An Extensive Library Of Video Game Magazines Is To Get As Complete A History

Part of the reason I maintain an extensive library of video game magazines is to get as complete a history as I can on any given subject. I don’t like loose ends! So when I was recently asked to talk on camera about how the American video game enthusiast media of 1995 felt about Nintendo’s RPG masterpiece, EarthBound, I was happy to be able to pull out what I believe to be every review written. And here they all are, lovingly scanned and restored by me! In order:

Electronic Gaming Monthly (July, 1995) Nintendo Power (June, 1995) Game Players (July, 1995) VideoGames (July, 1995) GameFan (”Viewpoint” capsule reviews) (August, 1995) GameFan (full review) (August, 1995) GamePro (July, 1995)

Next Generation and Electronic Games did not review the game. Game Informer appears to have not, but I don’t have the June or September issues, so I can’t say that with 100% certainty (also, if you have Game Informer issues from 1995-1999, we should talk). It’s worth noting that Nintendo Power also had a ten-page extended feature that I did not include, as it’s an overview with no criticism as opposed to a review (heck, even the “review” included here barely qualifies)

The biggest takeaway I get, slapping all these magazines on my desk and reading them back-to-back, is just how completely offended the critics were by the game’s art direction. The “infantile graphics” made VIdeoGames’ Geoff Higgins “want to gag,” apparently. EGM’s John Gurka “laughed out loud” when he first saw the game, while GameFan capsule reviewer Skid’s initial impression was “no way! These graphics are just to [sic] fruity.” Not one reviewer seemed to like the art direction, though some - particularly at GameFan - were able to power through it and enjoy the game underneath.

It’s tempting to look back and roll your eyes at how these critics just didn’t understand, man, just as it’s tempting to look at Nintendo’s “This Game Stinks” marketing campaign as coming from a marketing department that also didn’t understand, man, but I think they both tell us very clearly why this game didn’t catch on: this was a very difficult game to sell in 1995.

Sure, we all basically agree that the game is gorgeous now, but try to put yourself in the mindset of a video game critic in June of 1995, when the game debuted. RPGs were only just catching on in the U.S., ushering in what many felt was the start of “mature” games no longer being exclusively for those rich kids who had computers. Square’s Chrono Trigger was also coming out around the same time, so the sudden switch from the anime-inspired Square house style that most associated with the genre to a look that evoked childlike wonder must have been jarring.

And let’s not forget the rest of the video game industry at the time. Sega’s Saturn and Sony’s PlayStation were already out in Japan (and the former would see a surprise U.S. debut right about when these reviews were written), so for most cutting-edge game enthusiasts, it was starting to look like 2D graphics were a thing of the past. Even Nintendo was starting to leave 2D graphics behind: at that year’s Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January, when EarthBound was quietly shown for the first time, Nintendo’s main focus was on the 3D capabilities of its Super FX chip for the Super Nintendo. Literature from the time shows that its three spotlight games that show all had polygonal 3D graphics: StarFox 2, Comanche, and FX Fighter (literally none of these games actually managed to ship, but that’s another story).

And in the middle of all of this forward-thinking excitement, we’ve got this strange, backward-looking, reflective, beautiful game vying for attention. I can’t imagine a scenario where the game could have been a hit in this environment.

[Aggregating EarthBound’s contemporary review scores gives a figure of about 72%. If this was on Metacritic, that number would be in a yellow box.]

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techscales-blog

7 years ago

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