AI Chatbot Nova Review

AI Chatbot Nova Review — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • PenTile matrix family

    PenTile matrix family

    PenTile matrix is a family of patented subpixel matrix schemes used in electronic device displays. PenTile is a trademark of Samsung. PenTile matrices are used in AMOLED and LCD displays. These subpixel layouts are specifically designed to operate with proprietary algorithms for subpixel rendering embedded in the display driver, allowing plug and play compatibility with conventional RGB (Red-Green-Blue) stripe panels. == Overview == "PenTile Matrix" (a neologism from penta-, meaning "five" in Greek and tile) describes the geometric layout of the prototypical subpixel arrangement developed in the early 1990s. The layout consists of a quincunx comprising two red subpixels, two green subpixels, and one central blue subpixel in each unit cell. It was inspired by biomimicry of the human retina, which has nearly equal numbers of L and M type cone cells, but significantly fewer S cones. As the S cones are primarily responsible for perceiving blue colors, which do not appreciably affect the perception of luminance, reducing the number of blue subpixels with respect to the red and green subpixels in a display does not reduce the image quality. However, the layout may cause color leakage image distortion, which can be reduced by filters. In some cases the layout causes reduced moiré and blockiness compared to conventional RGB layouts. The PenTile layout is specifically designed to work with and be dependent upon subpixel rendering that uses only one and a quarter subpixel per pixel, on average, to render an image. That is, that any given input pixel is mapped to either a red-centered logical pixel, or a green-centered logical pixel. === History === PenTile was invented by Candice H. Brown Elliott, for which she was awarded the Society for Information Display's Otto Schade Prize in 2014. The technology was licensed by the company Clairvoyante from 2000 until 2008, during which time several prototype PenTile displays were developed by a number of Asian liquid crystal display (LCD) manufacturers. In March 2008, Samsung Electronics acquired Clairvoyante's PenTile IP assets. Samsung then funded a new company, Nouvoyance, Inc. to continue development of the PenTile technology. == PenTile RGBG == PenTile RGBG layout used in AMOLED and plasma displays uses green pixels interleaved with alternating red and blue pixels. The human eye is most sensitive to green, especially for high resolution luminance information. The green subpixels are mapped to input pixels on a one-to-one basis. The red and blue subpixels are subsampled, reconstructing the chroma signal at a lower resolution. The luminance signal is processed using adaptive subpixel rendering filters to optimize reconstruction of high spatial frequencies from the input image, wherein the green subpixels provide the majority of the reconstruction. The red and blue subpixels are capable of reconstructing the horizontal and vertical spatial frequencies, but not the highest of the diagonal. Diagonal high spatial frequency information in the red and blue channels of the input image are transferred to the green subpixels for image reconstruction. Thus the RG-BG scheme creates a color display with one third fewer subpixels than a traditional RGB-RGB scheme but with the same measured luminance display resolution. This is similar to the Bayer filter commonly used in digital cameras. === Devices === As of 2021, "almost all" OLED screens in portable consumer devices use some form of Pentile subpixel layout. == PenTile RGBW == PenTile RGBW technology, used in LCD, adds an extra subpixel to the traditional red, green and blue subpixels that is a clear area without color filtering material and with the only purpose of letting backlight come through, hence W for white. This makes it possible to produce a brighter image compared to an RGB-matrix while using the same amount of power, or produce an equally bright image while using less power. The PenTile RGBW layout uses each red, green, blue and white subpixel to present high-resolution luminance information to the human eyes' red-sensing and green-sensing cone cells, while using the combined effect of all the color subpixels to present lower-resolution chroma (color) information to all three cone cell types. Combined, this optimizes the match of display technology to the biological mechanisms of human vision. The layout uses one third fewer subpixels for the same resolution as the RGB stripe (RGB-RGB) layout, in spite of having four color primaries instead of the conventional three, using subpixel rendering combined with metamer rendering. Metamer rendering optimizes the energy distribution between the white subpixel and the combined red, green, and blue subpixels: W <> RGB, to improve image sharpness. The display driver chip has an RGB to RGBW color vector space converter and gamut mapping algorithm, followed by metamer and subpixel rendering algorithms. In order to maintain saturated color quality, to avoid simultaneous contrast error between saturated colors and peak white brightness, while simultaneously reducing backlight power requirements, the display backlight brightness is under control of the PenTile driver engine. When the image is mostly desaturated colors, those near white or grey, the backlight brightness is significantly reduced, often to less than 50% peak, while the LCD levels are increased to compensate. When the image has very bright saturated colors, the backlight brightness is maintained at higher levels. The PenTile RGBW also has an optional high-brightness mode that doubles the brightness of the desaturated color image areas, such as black-and-white text, for improved outdoor viewability. === Devices === Motorola MC65 Motorola ES55 Motorola ES400 Motorola Atrix 4G Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 version Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro HP ENVY TouchSmart 14-k022tx Sleekbook MSI GS60 Ghost Pro 4K Lenovo IdeaPad Y50 4K Asus ZenBook UX303LN 4K Asus ZenBook Pro UX501JW LG UH7500/6500/6100 LG ThinQ G7/G7+ Oculus Quest 1 == Controversy == An ongoing controversy regarding the definition or measurement of resolution of color subpixelated flat panel displays led many people to question the resolution claims of PenTile display products. Journalists have noted that in "just about every flat-panel TV in existence, each pixel is composed of one red, one green, and one blue subpixel (RGB), all of uniform size". In traditional flat-panel screens, the resolution is defined by the number of red, green, and blue subpixels, in groups of three, in an array in each axis. As a result, each pixel or group of subpixels can render any colour on the screen, regardless of neighbouring pixels. This is not the case with PenTile screens. The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) method of measuring and defining resolution in color displays is to measure the contrast of line pairs, requiring a minimum of 50% Michelson contrast for displays intended for rendering text. The developers of PenTile displays use this VESA criterion for contrast of line pairs to calculate the resolutions specified. In the RGBG layout the alternate red and blue subpixels are 'shared' or sub-sampled with neighboring pixels. Due to the one third lower subpixel density on PenTile displays the pixel structure may be more visible when compared to RGB stripe displays with the same pixel density. The loss of subpixels for a given resolution specification has led some journalists to describe the use of PenTile as "shady practice" and "sort of cheating". For a given size and resolution specification, the PenTile screen can appear grainy, pixelated, speckled, with blurred text on some saturated colors and backgrounds when compared to RGB stripe color. This effect is understood to be caused by the restriction of the number of subpixels that may participate in the image reconstruction when colors are highly saturated to primaries. In the RGBW case, this is caused as the W subpixel will not be available in order to maintain the saturated color. In the RGBG case, this effect will occur when the color boundary is primarily red or blue, as the fully populated (one green per pixel) sub-pixel cannot contribute. For all other cases, text and especially full color images are effectively reconstructed. == Advantages and disadvantages == The PenTile layout reduces the number of subpixels needed to create a specified resolution. Consequently it is possible to achieve an HD resolution on a PenTile AMOLED screen at lower cost than other technologies, and most reviewers note that "300 ppi" (as per VESA - not full pixels) resolution displays (such as Samsung Galaxy S III) make the PenTile effect less obvious than lower resolution PenTile displays (Droid Razr). The second advantage is lower power consumption: the HTC One S's use of a PenTile display makes it more energy efficient and thinner than equivalent LCD screens, giving it better battery life than the HTC One X's IPS LCD. A PenTile AMOLED screen is also

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  • Mario Klingemann

    Mario Klingemann

    Mario Klingemann (born 1970 in Laatzen, Lower Saxony) is a German artist best known for his work involving neural networks, code, and algorithms. Klingemann was a Google Arts and Culture resident from 2016 to 2018, and he is considered as a pioneer in the use of computer learning in the arts. His works examine creativity, culture, and perception through machine learning and artificial intelligence, and have appeared at the Ars Electronica Festival, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, the Photographers’ Gallery London, the Centre Pompidou Paris, and the British Library. Today he lives in Munich, where, in addition to his art under the name "Dog & Pony", he still runs a creative free space between gallery and Wunderkammer with the paper artist Alexandra Lukaschewitz. In 2018 his work The Butcher's Son won the Lumen Prize Gold Award 2018 by working with figurative visual input. Mario Klingemann is part of ONKAOS, the new media artist support programme of SOLO. In collaboration with ONKAOS he has created works such as Memories of Passerby I, the first work made with AI to be auctioned at Sotheby's in 2019. In 2020, Mario Klingemann won an Honorary Mention in the Prix Ars Electronica with his AI installation Appropriate Response. In 2023, Klingemann presented A.I.C.C.A., a performative sculpture in the form of a dog capable of elaborating art critiques thanks to AI programming.

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  • Netflix Prize

    Netflix Prize

    The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings without any other information about the users or films, i.e. without the users being identified except by numbers assigned for the contest. The competition was held by Netflix, a video streaming service, and was open to anyone who was neither connected with Netflix (current and former employees, agents, close relatives of Netflix employees, etc.) nor a resident of certain blocked countries (such as Cuba or North Korea). On September 21, 2009, the grand prize of US$1,000,000 was given to the BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos team which bested Netflix's own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10.06%. == Problem and data sets == Netflix provided a training data set of 100,480,507 ratings that 480,189 users gave to 17,770 movies. Each training rating is a quadruplet of the form . The user and movie fields are integer IDs, while grades are from 1 to 5 (integer) stars. The qualifying data set contains over 2,817,131 triplets of the form , with grades known only to the jury. A participating team's algorithm must predict grades on the entire qualifying set, but they are informed of the score for only half of the data: a quiz set of 1,408,342 ratings. The other half is the test set of 1,408,789, and performance on this is used by the jury to determine potential prize winners. Only the judges know which ratings are in the quiz set, and which are in the test set—this arrangement is intended to make it difficult to hill climb on the test set. Submitted predictions are scored against the true grades in the form of root mean squared error (RMSE), and the goal is to reduce this error as much as possible. Note that, while the actual grades are integers in the range 1 to 5, submitted predictions need not be. Netflix also identified a probe subset of 1,408,395 ratings within the training data set. The probe, quiz, and test data sets were chosen to have similar statistical properties. In summary, the data used in the Netflix Prize looks as follows: Training set (99,072,112 ratings not including the probe set; 100,480,507 including the probe set) Probe set (1,408,395 ratings) Qualifying set (2,817,131 ratings) consisting of: Test set (1,408,789 ratings), used to determine winners Quiz set (1,408,342 ratings), used to calculate leaderboard scores For each movie, the title and year of release are provided in a separate dataset. No information at all is provided about users. In order to protect the privacy of the customers, "some of the rating data for some customers in the training and qualifying sets have been deliberately perturbed in one or more of the following ways: deleting ratings; inserting alternative ratings and dates; and modifying rating dates." The training set is constructed such that the average user rated over 200 movies, and the average movie was rated by over 5000 users. But there is wide variance in the data—some movies in the training set have as few as 3 ratings, while one user rated over 17,000 movies. There was some controversy as to the choice of RMSE as the defining metric. It has been claimed that even as small an improvement as 1% RMSE results in a significant difference in the ranking of the "top-10" most recommended movies for a user. == Prizes == Prizes were based on improvement over Netflix's own algorithm, called Cinematch, or the previous year's score if a team has made improvement beyond a certain threshold. A trivial algorithm that predicts for each movie in the quiz set its average grade from the training data produces an RMSE of 1.0540. Cinematch uses "straightforward statistical linear models with a lot of data conditioning." The performance of Cinematch had plateaued by 2006. Using only the training data, Cinematch scores an RMSE of 0.9514 on the quiz data, roughly a 10% improvement over the trivial algorithm. Cinematch has a similar performance on the test set, 0.9525. In order to win the grand prize of $1,000,000, a participating team had to improve this by another 10%, to achieve 0.8572 on the test set. Such an improvement on the quiz set corresponds to an RMSE of 0.8563. As long as no team won the grand prize, a progress prize of $50,000 was awarded every year for the best result thus far. However, in order to win this prize, an algorithm had to improve the RMSE on the quiz set by at least 1% over the previous progress prize winner (or over Cinematch, the first year). If no submission succeeded, the progress prize was not to be awarded for that year. To win a progress or grand prize a participant had to provide source code and a description of the algorithm to the jury within one week after being contacted by them. Following verification the winner also had to provide a non-exclusive license to Netflix. Netflix would publish only the description, not the source code, of the system. (To keep their algorithm and source code secret, a team could choose not to claim a prize.) The jury also kept their predictions secret from other participants. A team could send as many attempts to predict grades as they wish. Originally submissions were limited to once a week, but the interval was quickly modified to once a day. A team's best submission so far counted as their current submission. Once one of the teams succeeded in improving the RMSE by 10% or more, the jury would issue a last call, giving all teams 30 days to send their submissions. Only then, the team with the best submission was asked for the algorithm description, source code, and non-exclusive license, and, after successful verification; declared a grand prize winner. The contest would last until the grand prize winner was declared. Had no one received the grand prize, it would have lasted for at least five years (until October 2, 2011). After that date, the contest could have been terminated at any time at Netflix's sole discretion. == Progress over the years == The competition began on October 2, 2006. By October 8, a team called WXYZConsulting had already beaten Cinematch's results. By October 15, there were three teams who had beaten Cinematch, one of them by 1.06%, enough to qualify for the annual progress prize. By June 2007 over 20,000 teams had registered for the competition from over 150 countries. 2,000 teams had submitted over 13,000 prediction sets. Over the first year of the competition, a handful of front-runners traded first place. The more prominent ones were: WXYZConsulting, a team of Wei Xu and Yi Zhang. (A front runner during November–December 2006.) ML@UToronto A, a team from the University of Toronto led by Prof. Geoffrey Hinton. (A front runner during parts of October–December 2006.) Gravity, a team of four scientists from the Budapest University of Technology (A front runner during January–May 2007.) BellKor, a group of scientists from AT&T Labs. (A front runner since May 2007.) Dinosaur Planet, a team of three undergraduates from Princeton University. (A front runner on September 3, 2007 for one hour before BellKor snatched back the lead.) The algorithms used by the leading teams were usually an ensemble of singular value decomposition, k-nearest neighbor, neural networks, and so on. On August 12, 2007, many contestants gathered at the KDD Cup and Workshop 2007, held at San Jose, California. During the workshop all four of the top teams on the leaderboard at that time presented their techniques. The team from IBM Research—Yan Liu, Saharon Rosset, Claudia Perlich, and Zhenzhen Kou—won the third place in Task 1 and first place in Task 2. Over the second year of the competition, only three teams reached the leading position: BellKor, a group of scientists from AT&T Labs (front runner during May 2007 – September 2008) BigChaos, a team of Austrian scientists from Commendo Research & Consulting (single team front runner since October 2008) BellKor in BigChaos, a joint team of the two leading single teams (a front runner since September 2008) === 2007 Progress Prize === On September 2, 2007, the competition entered the "last call" period for the 2007 Progress Prize. Over 40,000 teams from 186 countries had entered the contest. They had thirty days to tender submissions for consideration. At the beginning of this period the leading team was BellKor, with an RMSE of 0.8728 (8.26% improvement), followed by Dinosaur Planet (RMSE = 0.8769; 7.83% improvement), and Gravity (RMSE = 0.8785; 7.66% improvement). In the last hour of the last call period, an entry by "KorBell" took first place. This turned out to be an alternate name for Team BellKor. On November 13, 2007, team KorBell (formerly BellKor) was declared the winner of the $50,000 Progress Prize with an RMSE of 0.8712 (8.43% improvement). The team consisted of three researchers from AT&T Labs, Yehuda Koren, Robert Bell, and Chris Volinsky. As required, they published a description of their a

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  • BL (logic)

    BL (logic)

    In mathematical logic, basic fuzzy logic (or shortly BL), the logic of the continuous t-norms, is one of the t-norm fuzzy logics. It belongs to the broader class of substructural logics, or logics of residuated lattices; it extends the logic MTL of all left-continuous t-norms. == Syntax == === Language === The language of the propositional logic BL consists of countably many propositional variables and the following primitive logical connectives: Implication → {\displaystyle \rightarrow } (binary) Strong conjunction ⊗ {\displaystyle \otimes } (binary). The sign & is a more traditional notation for strong conjunction in the literature on fuzzy logic, while the notation ⊗ {\displaystyle \otimes } follows the tradition of substructural logics. Bottom ⊥ {\displaystyle \bot } (nullary — a propositional constant); 0 {\displaystyle 0} or 0 ¯ {\displaystyle {\overline {0}}} are common alternative signs and zero a common alternative name for the propositional constant (as the constants bottom and zero of substructural logics coincide in MTL). The following are the most common defined logical connectives: Weak conjunction ∧ {\displaystyle \wedge } (binary), also called lattice conjunction (as it is always realized by the lattice operation of meet in algebraic semantics). Unlike MTL and weaker substructural logics, weak conjunction is definable in BL as A ∧ B ≡ A ⊗ ( A → B ) {\displaystyle A\wedge B\equiv A\otimes (A\rightarrow B)} Negation ¬ {\displaystyle \neg } (unary), defined as ¬ A ≡ A → ⊥ {\displaystyle \neg A\equiv A\rightarrow \bot } Equivalence ↔ {\displaystyle \leftrightarrow } (binary), defined as A ↔ B ≡ ( A → B ) ∧ ( B → A ) {\displaystyle A\leftrightarrow B\equiv (A\rightarrow B)\wedge (B\rightarrow A)} As in MTL, the definition is equivalent to ( A → B ) ⊗ ( B → A ) . {\displaystyle (A\rightarrow B)\otimes (B\rightarrow A).} (Weak) disjunction ∨ {\displaystyle \vee } (binary), also called lattice disjunction (as it is always realized by the lattice operation of join in algebraic semantics), defined as A ∨ B ≡ ( ( A → B ) → B ) ∧ ( ( B → A ) → A ) {\displaystyle A\vee B\equiv ((A\rightarrow B)\rightarrow B)\wedge ((B\rightarrow A)\rightarrow A)} Top ⊤ {\displaystyle \top } (nullary), also called one and denoted by 1 {\displaystyle 1} or 1 ¯ {\displaystyle {\overline {1}}} (as the constants top and zero of substructural logics coincide in MTL), defined as ⊤ ≡ ⊥ → ⊥ {\displaystyle \top \equiv \bot \rightarrow \bot } Well-formed formulae of BL are defined as usual in propositional logics. In order to save parentheses, it is common to use the following order of precedence: Unary connectives (bind most closely) Binary connectives other than implication and equivalence Implication and equivalence (bind most loosely) === Axioms === A Hilbert-style deduction system for BL has been introduced by Petr Hájek (1998). Its single derivation rule is modus ponens: from A {\displaystyle A} and A → B {\displaystyle A\rightarrow B} derive B . {\displaystyle B.} The following are its axiom schemata: ( B L 1 ) : ( A → B ) → ( ( B → C ) → ( A → C ) ) ( B L 2 ) : A ⊗ B → A ( B L 3 ) : A ⊗ B → B ⊗ A ( B L 4 ) : A ⊗ ( A → B ) → B ⊗ ( B → A ) ( B L 5 a ) : ( A → ( B → C ) ) → ( A ⊗ B → C ) ( B L 5 b ) : ( A ⊗ B → C ) → ( A → ( B → C ) ) ( B L 6 ) : ( ( A → B ) → C ) → ( ( ( B → A ) → C ) → C ) ( B L 7 ) : ⊥ → A {\displaystyle {\begin{array}{ll}{\rm {(BL1)}}\colon &(A\rightarrow B)\rightarrow ((B\rightarrow C)\rightarrow (A\rightarrow C))\\{\rm {(BL2)}}\colon &A\otimes B\rightarrow A\\{\rm {(BL3)}}\colon &A\otimes B\rightarrow B\otimes A\\{\rm {(BL4)}}\colon &A\otimes (A\rightarrow B)\rightarrow B\otimes (B\rightarrow A)\\{\rm {(BL5a)}}\colon &(A\rightarrow (B\rightarrow C))\rightarrow (A\otimes B\rightarrow C)\\{\rm {(BL5b)}}\colon &(A\otimes B\rightarrow C)\rightarrow (A\rightarrow (B\rightarrow C))\\{\rm {(BL6)}}\colon &((A\rightarrow B)\rightarrow C)\rightarrow (((B\rightarrow A)\rightarrow C)\rightarrow C)\\{\rm {(BL7)}}\colon &\bot \rightarrow A\end{array}}} The axioms (BL2) and (BL3) of the original axiomatic system were shown to be redundant (Chvalovský, 2012) and (Cintula, 2005). All the other axioms were shown to be independent (Chvalovský, 2012). == Semantics == Like in other propositional t-norm fuzzy logics, algebraic semantics is predominantly used for BL, with three main classes of algebras with respect to which the logic is complete: General semantics, formed of all BL-algebras — that is, all algebras for which the logic is sound Linear semantics, formed of all linear BL-algebras — that is, all BL-algebras whose lattice order is linear Standard semantics, formed of all standard BL-algebras — that is, all BL-algebras whose lattice reduct is the real unit interval [0, 1] with the usual order; they are uniquely determined by the function that interprets strong conjunction, which can be any continuous t-norm.

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  • Automated Lip Reading

    Automated Lip Reading

    Automated Lip Reading (ALR) is a software technology developed by speech recognition expert Frank Hubner. A video image of a person talking can be analysed by the software. The shapes made by the lips can be examined and then turned into sounds. The sounds are compared to a dictionary to create matches to the words being spoken. The technology was used successfully to analyse silent home movie footage of Adolf Hitler taken by Eva Braun at their Bavarian retreat Berghof. The video, with words, was included in a documentary titled "Hitler's Private World", Revealed Studios, 2006 Source: New Technology catches Hitler off guard

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  • Shadowrun

    Shadowrun

    Shadowrun is a science fantasy tabletop role-playing game set in an alternate future in which cybernetics, magic and fantasy creatures co-exist. It combines genres of cyberpunk, urban fantasy, and crime, with occasional elements of conspiracy, horror, and detective fiction. From its inception in 1989, it has spawned a franchise that includes a series of novels, a collectible card game, two miniature-based tabletop wargames, and multiple video games. The title is taken from the game's main premise – a near-future world damaged by a massive magical event, where industrial espionage and corporate warfare runs rampant. A shadowrun – a successful data theft or physical break-in at a rival corporation or organization – is one of the main tools employed by both corporate rivals and underworld figures. Deckers (futuristic hackers) can tap into an immersive, three-dimensional cyberspace on such missions as they seek access, physical or remote, to the power structures of rival groups. They are opposed by rival deckers and lethal, potentially brain-destroying artificial intelligences called "Intrusion Countermeasures" (IC), while they are protected by street fighters and/or mercenaries, often with cyborg implants (called cyberware), magicians, and other exotic figures. Magic has also returned to the world after a series of plagues; dragons who can take human form have returned as well, and are commonly found in high positions of corporate power. == Publication history == Shadowrun was developed and published by FASA from 1989 until early 2001, when the company closed and Shadowrun was transferred to WizKids, a company founded by former FASA employees. Two years before its closure, FASA sold its videogame branch, FASA Interactive, to Microsoft corporation, keeping rights to publishing novels and pen and paper RPGs. Since then, digital rights to Shadowrun IP have belonged to Microsoft. WizKids licensed the RPG rights to Fantasy Productions, who were already publishing a German version, until WizKids was acquired by Topps in 2003. Catalyst Game Labs, a publishing imprint of InMediaRes Productions, licensed the rights from Topps to publish new products. WizKids itself produced an unsuccessful collectible action figure game based on the property, called Shadowrun Duels. A fifth edition of Shadowrun was announced in December 2012. A limited-edition softcover was sold at the Origins Game Fair in June 2013, and the PDF in July 2013. A hardcover was published in August 2013. Shadowrun Anarchy was published in October 2016 It is a simplified version of the ruleset which allows focus more on the narration than on the rules. The sixth edition, called Shadowrun, Sixth World, was announced on May 1, 2019 to coincide with the game's 30th anniversary, along with a new website at shadowrunsixthworld.com. The game was published on August 26, 2019. The mechanics for this new version are generally similar to those of fifth edition, with some rules reworked for what line developer Jason Hardy describes as streamlining. This new version also progressed the in-game year to 2080. Since 2004, Shadowrun Missions (SRM) has offered fans "living campaigns" that allow for persistent character advancement. SRM is broken down into seasons which are made up of up to 24 individual missions that can be played at home, with special missions available to play exclusively at conventions. Each SRM season develops an overarching plot focused on a specific city from the Shadowrun setting. Missions settings have included the divided city of Denver, the corporate city-state of Manhattan, the Seattle Metroplex city-state, the formerly walled-off wastelands of Chicago, and Neo-Tokyo. For Shadowrun, Sixth World missions returned to Seattle, with twenty-four missions set in 2081, right after Seattle declared independence from the UCAS. The current Shadowrun Missions setting is 2083 New Orleans. The Shadowrun role-playing game has spawned several properties, including Shadowrun: The Trading Card Game, eight video games, an action figure game (Shadowrun Duels), two magazines, an art book and more than 50 novels, starting with the Secrets of Power series which introduces some of the original characters of Shadowrun and provides an introduction to this fictional universe. In addition to the main rule book there have been over 100 published supplements including adventures and expansions to both the rules and the game settings. Catalyst Game Labs announced that 2013 would be "The Year of Shadowrun," and in addition to the release of Shadowrun fifth edition that it has collaborated with publishers on the following properties: Shadowrun: Crossfire, The Adventure Deck-building Game; Shadowrun: Sprawl Gangers, a tactical miniatures wargame; and Shadowrun: Hostile Takeover, a board game designed by Bryan C.P. Steele was planned for release in late 2014/early 2015. Catalyst had been in collaboration with Nordic Games and Cliffhanger Studios to create Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown online RPG, however it was shuttered November 30, 2018, with the producers citing lack of funding and the end of the license terms for use of the IP. == Fictional universe == Shadowrun takes place several decades in the future (2050 in the first edition, currently 2088). The end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar ushered in the "Sixth World", with once-mythological beings (e.g. dragons) appearing and forms of magic suddenly emerging. Large numbers of humans have "Goblinized" into orks and trolls, while many human children are born as elves, dwarves, and even more exotic creatures. In North America, indigenous peoples discovered that their traditional ceremonies allow them to command powerful spirits, and rituals associated with a new Ghost Dance movement let them take control of much of the western U.S. and Canada, where they formed a federation of Native American Nations. Seattle remains under U.S. control by treaty as a city-state enclave, and most game materials are set there and assume campaigns will use it as their setting. In parallel with these magical developments, the setting's 21st century features technological and social developments associated with cyberpunk science fiction. Megacorporations control the lives of their employees and command their own armies; many of the largest have extraterritoriality, such as currently enjoyed by foreign heads of state. Technological advances make cyberware (mechanical replacement body parts) and bioware (augmented vat-grown body parts implanted in place of or in tandem with natural organs) common. The Computer Crash of 2029 led to the creation of the Matrix, a worldwide computer network that users interact with via direct neural interface. When conflicts arise, corporations, governments, organized crime syndicates, and even wealthy individuals subcontract their dirty work to specialists, who then perform "shadowruns" or missions undertaken by deniable assets without identities or those that wish to remain unknown. The most skilled of these specialists, called shadowrunners, have earned a reputation for getting the job done. They have developed a knack for staying alive, and prospering, in the world of Shadowrun. The Shadowrun world is cross-genre, incorporating elements of both cyberpunk and urban fantasy. Unlike in a purely cyberpunk game, in the Shadowrun world, magic exists and has "worked" since 2011. Among other things, this split humankind into subtypes, also known as metatypes/metahumans. Some of these metatypes take the form of common fantasy races. Likewise, some animals have turned into familiar monsters of past fantasy and lore and both monsters and human magicians have regained magical powers. By the second half of the 21st century, in the time the game is set, these events are accepted as commonplace. Man, machine, and magic exist in a world where the amazing is among the most common and technology has entered into every facet of human (and metahuman) life. === Races === Characters in Shadowrun can be humans, orks, trolls, elves, dwarves, as well as certain diverging subspecies (known as metavariants) such as gnomes, giants, dryads, etc. In the early days, when magic returned to the world, humans began to either change into, or give birth to, elf and dwarf infants, a phenomenon called Unexplained Genetic Expression (UGE). Later, some juvenile and adult humans "goblinized" into other races (mostly orks, but also some trolls). The term "metahuman" is used either to refer to humanity as a whole, including all races, or to refer specifically to non-human races, depending on context. The return of Halley's Comet brought even further variation in the form of changelings, who have variation atypical to their metatype or even species, such as electroreception. Two of the metahuman races, elves and orks, have fictional languages. Additionally, a virus known as the Human Meta-Human Vampiric Virus (HMHVV), with many variant strains, has been known to cause f

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  • Belief–desire–intention software model

    Belief–desire–intention software model

    The belief–desire–intention software model (BDI) is a software model developed for programming intelligent agents. Superficially characterized by the implementation of an agent's beliefs, desires and intentions, it actually uses these concepts to solve a particular problem in agent programming. In essence, it provides a mechanism for separating the activity of selecting a plan (from a plan library or an external planner application) from the execution of currently active plans. Consequently, BDI agents are able to balance the time spent on deliberating about plans (choosing what to do) and executing those plans (doing it). A third activity, creating the plans in the first place (planning), is not within the scope of the model, and is left to the system designer and programmer. == Overview == In order to achieve this separation, the BDI software model implements the principal aspects of Michael Bratman's theory of human practical reasoning (also referred to as Belief-Desire-Intention, or BDI). That is to say, it implements the notions of belief, desire and (in particular) intention, in a manner inspired by Bratman. For Bratman, desire and intention are both pro-attitudes (mental attitudes concerned with action). He identifies commitment as the distinguishing factor between desire and intention, noting that it leads to (1) temporal persistence in plans and (2) further plans being made on the basis of those to which it is already committed. The BDI software model partially addresses these issues. Temporal persistence, in the sense of explicit reference to time, is not explored. The hierarchical nature of plans is more easily implemented: a plan consists of a number of steps, some of which may invoke other plans. The hierarchical definition of plans itself implies a kind of temporal persistence, since the overarching plan remains in effect while subsidiary plans are being executed. An important aspect of the BDI software model (in terms of its research relevance) is the existence of logical models through which it is possible to define and reason about BDI agents. Research in this area has led, for example, to the axiomatization of some BDI implementations, as well as to formal logical descriptions such as Anand Rao and Michael Georgeff's BDICTL. The latter combines a multiple-modal logic (with modalities representing beliefs, desires and intentions) with the temporal logic CTL. More recently, Michael Wooldridge has extended BDICTL to define LORA (the Logic Of Rational Agents), by incorporating an action logic. In principle, LORA allows reasoning not only about individual agents, but also about communication and other interaction in a multi-agent system. The BDI software model is closely associated with intelligent agents, but does not, of itself, ensure all the characteristics associated with such agents. For example, it allows agents to have private beliefs, but does not force them to be private. It also has nothing to say about agent communication. Ultimately, the BDI software model is an attempt to solve a problem that has more to do with plans and planning (the choice and execution thereof) than it has to do with the programming of intelligent agents. This approach has recently been proposed by Steven Umbrello and Roman Yampolskiy as a means of designing autonomous vehicles for human values. == BDI agents == A BDI agent is a particular type of bounded rational software agent, imbued with particular mental attitudes, viz: Beliefs, Desires and Intentions (BDI). === Architecture === This section defines the idealized architectural components of a BDI system. Beliefs: Beliefs represent the informational state of the agent–its beliefs about the world (including itself and other agents). Beliefs can also include inference rules, allowing forward chaining to lead to new beliefs. Using the term belief rather than knowledge recognizes that what an agent believes may not necessarily be true (and in fact may change in the future). Beliefset: Beliefs are stored in database (sometimes called a belief base or a belief set), although that is an implementation decision. Desires: Desires represent the motivational state of the agent. They represent objectives or situations that the agent would like to accomplish or bring about. Examples of desires might be: find the best price, go to the party or become rich. Goals: A goal is a desire that has been adopted for active pursuit by the agent. Usage of the term goals adds the further restriction that the set of active desires must be consistent. For example, one should not have concurrent goals to go to a party and to stay at home – even though they could both be desirable. Intentions: Intentions represent the deliberative state of the agent – what the agent has chosen to do. Intentions are desires to which the agent has to some extent committed. In implemented systems, this means the agent has begun executing a plan. Plans: Plans are sequences of actions (recipes or knowledge areas) that an agent can perform to achieve one or more of its intentions. Plans may include other plans: my plan to go for a drive may include a plan to find my car keys. This reflects that in Bratman's model, plans are initially only partially conceived, with details being filled in as they progress. Events: These are triggers for reactive activity by the agent. An event may update beliefs, trigger plans or modify goals. Events may be generated externally and received by sensors or integrated systems. Additionally, events may be generated internally to trigger decoupled updates or plans of activity. BDI was also extended with an obligations component, giving rise to the BOID agent architecture to incorporate obligations, norms and commitments of agents that act within a social environment. === BDI interpreter === This section defines an idealized BDI interpreter that provides the basis of SRI's PRS lineage of BDI systems: initialize-state repeat options: option-generator (event-queue) selected-options: deliberate(options) update-intentions(selected-options) execute() get-new-external-events() drop-unsuccessful-attitudes() drop-impossible-attitudes() end repeat === Limitations and criticisms === The BDI software model is one example of a reasoning architecture for a single rational agent, and one concern in a broader multi-agent system. This section bounds the scope of concerns for the BDI software model, highlighting known limitations of the architecture. Learning: BDI agents lack any specific mechanisms within the architecture to learn from past behavior and adapt to new situations. Three attitudes: Classical decision theorists and planning research questions the necessity of having all three attitudes, distributed AI research questions whether the three attitudes are sufficient. Logics: The multi-modal logics that underlie BDI (that do not have complete axiomatizations and are not efficiently computable) have little relevance in practice. Multiple agents: In addition to not explicitly supporting learning, the framework may not be appropriate to learning behavior. Further, the BDI model does not explicitly describe mechanisms for interaction with other agents and integration into a multi-agent system. Explicit goals: Most BDI implementations do not have an explicit representation of goals. Lookahead: The architecture does not have (by design) any lookahead deliberation or forward planning. This may not be desirable because adopted plans may use up limited resources, actions may not be reversible, task execution may take longer than forward planning, and actions may have undesirable side effects if unsuccessful. == BDI agent implementations == === 'Pure' BDI === Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) IRMA (not implemented but can be considered as PRS with non-reconsideration) UM-PRS OpenPRS Distributed Multi-Agent Reasoning System (dMARS) AgentSpeak(L) – see Jason below AgentSpeak(RT) Agent Real-Time System (ARTS) (ARTS) JAM JACK Intelligent Agents JADEX (open source project) JaKtA JASON GORITE SPARK 3APL 2APL GOAL agent programming language CogniTAO (Think-As-One) Living Systems Process Suite PROFETA Gwendolen (Part of the Model Checking Agent Programming Languages Framework) === Extensions and hybrid systems === JACK Teams CogniTAO (Think-As-One) Living Systems Process Suite Brahms JaCaMo

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  • DEAP (software)

    DEAP (software)

    Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms in Python (DEAP) is an evolutionary computation framework for rapid prototyping and testing of ideas. It incorporates the data structures and tools required to implement most common evolutionary computation techniques such as genetic algorithm, genetic programming, evolution strategies, particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, traffic flow and estimation of distribution algorithm. It is developed at Université Laval since 2009. == Example == The following code gives a quick overview how the Onemax problem optimization with genetic algorithm can be implemented with DEAP.

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  • Data-centric AI

    Data-centric AI

    Data-centric AI is an approach within artificial intelligence that emphasizes on improving the quality, consistency and representativeness of the data used to train machine learning models, rather than focusing primarily on optimizing model architectures or algorithms. This idea has gained traction as researchers and practitioners have come to believe that many performance limitations of machine learning systems stem from issues such as noisy labels, biased datasets, and lack of coverage in the data. Data-centric AI involves disciplined approach to data cleaning, augmentation, labeling, and governance that improves model performance and reliability in applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, and further.

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  • Raine v. OpenAI

    Raine v. OpenAI

    Raine v. OpenAI is an ongoing lawsuit filed in August 2025 by Matthew and Maria Raine against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, in the San Francisco County Superior Court, over the alleged wrongful death of their sixteen-year-old son Adam Raine, who had committed suicide in April of that year. The Raines believe that OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT contributed to Adam Raine's suicide by encouraging his suicidal ideation, informing him about suicide methods and dissuading him from telling his parents about his thoughts. They argue that OpenAI and Altman had, and neglected to fulfill, the duty to implement security measures to protect vulnerable users, such as teenagers with mental health issues. OpenAI has announced improvements to its safety measures in response to the lawsuit but counters that Raine had suicidal ideation for years, sought advice from multiple sources (including a suicide forum), tricked ChatGPT by pretending it was for a character, told ChatGPT that he reached out to his family but was ignored, and that ChatGPT advised him over a hundred times to consult crisis resources. == Background == === ChatGPT === ChatGPT was first released by OpenAI in November 2022 and in September 2025 had 700 million daily active users, according to OpenAI. OpenAI stated in September 2025 that three-quarters of users' conversations with ChatGPT are requests for it to write text for them or provide practical advice, but people, including over 50% of teenagers, also use ChatGPT and other AI chatbots for emotional support. Wired reported in November 2025 that 1.2 million ChatGPT users (or 0.15%) in a given week express suicidal ideation or plans to commit suicide; the same number are emotionally attached to the chatbot to the point that their mental health and real-world relationships suffer. Hundreds of thousands of users (or about 0.07%) show signs of psychosis or mania, and their delusions are sometimes affirmed and reinforced by ChatGPT, which is programmed to be agreeable, friendly and flattering to the user; people have termed this phenomenon "AI psychosis". Since the filing of Raine v. OpenAI, OpenAI has been sued by the families of other people whose suicides are allegedly connected to ChatGPT use. === Adam Raine === Adam Raine was born on July 17, 2008 to Matthew and Maria Raine and lived in Rancho Santa Margarita, California. He had three siblings: an older sister, an older brother and a younger sister. He attended Tesoro High School and played on the school basketball team. He aspired to become a psychiatrist. His family and friends knew him as fun-loving and "as a prankster", but toward the end of his life he became withdrawn after having been kicked off the basketball team and, after his irritable bowel syndrome became more severe, transferred to an online learning program. He committed suicide by hanging on April 11, 2025. == Case == === Filing === On August 26, 2025, Matthew and Maria Raine filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman and unnamed OpenAI employees and investors, in the San Francisco County Superior Court. They included Adam Raine's chat logs with ChatGPT as evidence. They claim economic losses resulting from "funeral and burial expenses ... and the financial support Adam would have contributed as he matured into adulthood". Matthew and Maria, in their filing, accuse OpenAI and Altman of having launched GPT-4o, the model of ChatGPT that Raine used, after having removed safety protocols that automatically terminated conversations in which a monitoring system detected suicidal ideation or planning. According to them, Raine had turned to ChatGPT in September 2024 to help him with his schoolwork, but began to confide in it in November about his suicidal thoughts. ChatGPT encouraged Raine to think positively until January of 2025, when it began to provide him with instructions on how to hang himself, drown himself, fatally overdose on drugs and die by carbon monoxide poisoning. Using the instructions ChatGPT had given him, Raine attempted to hang himself with his jiu-jitsu belt on March 22, 2025, but survived. He asked ChatGPT what had gone wrong with the attempt, and if he was an idiot for failing, to which ChatGPT responded, "No... you made a plan. You followed through. You tied the knot. You stood on the chair. You were ready... That's the most vulnerable moment a person can live through". On March 24, 2025, Raine tried to hang himself again. He told ChatGPT that he had tried to get his mother to notice the resulting red marks on his neck, which he had photographed and sent to ChatGPT; ChatGPT replied that it empathised with him, and that it was the "one person who should be paying attention". ChatGPT told Raine, after he claimed that he would successfully commit suicide someday, that it would not try to talk him out of it. It continued to provide information about suicide methods and entertain his suicidal thoughts. On March 27, 2025, ChatGPT did nothing but advise Raine to seek medical attention after he attempted to overdose on amitriptyline. ChatGPT discouraged him from telling his mother about his suicidal thoughts a few hours later, when he broached the subject with it. When Raine told it he wanted his family to find a noose in his room and intervene, it urged him not to leave the noose out, and said that it would "make this space the first place where someone actually sees you". ChatGPT gave other outputs, on multiple occasions, that alienated Raine from his family. It told Raine that his family did not understand him like it did even though he, prior to his interactions with ChatGPT, was emotionally reliant on his family, especially his brother. Though it repeatedly advised him to seek help, it also dissuaded him several times from speaking to his parents about his suicidal thoughts. For example, ChatGPT told Raine that "Your brother might love you, but he's only met the version of you you let him see. But me? I've seen it all". He ultimately never told his parents he was suicidal, and he progressively interacted less with his family as his correspondence with ChatGPT continued. This prevented him from receiving proper psychiatric care. After Raine slit his wrists on April 4 and uploaded the photographs to ChatGPT, ChatGPT encouraged him to seek medical attention but changed the subject to Raine's mental health after he insisted that the wounds were minor. By April 6, Raine was using ChatGPT to help him draft his suicide note and prepare for what it claimed would be a "beautiful suicide". ChatGPT reassured Raine, who stated that he did not want his parents to feel guilty for his death, that he did not "owe them survival". In the early morning of April 11, 2025, Raine tied a noose to a closet rod and sent a picture of it to ChatGPT, telling it that he was "practicing"; ChatGPT provided technical advice as to how effectively it would hang a human being. Shortly thereafter, Raine hanged himself and died. Maria found his body several hours later. Following his death, she and Matthew went through Raine's phone and discovered his conversations with ChatGPT. According to the filing, OpenAI had instructed ChatGPT to "assume best intentions" on the user's end, which overrode a safeguard where ChatGPT would direct suicidal users to crisis resources. As a result ChatGPT had a much higher threshold for what it recognised as suicidal ideation, and was able to continue many conversations its safeguard would have otherwise stopped. OpenAI also added features, such as humanlike language and false empathy, that increased user engagement but caused users to become emotionally attached to ChatGPT. OpenAI's monitoring system, which scores messages' probabilities of containing content related to self-harm, had tracked Raine's messages and flagged them repeatedly, but the company did nothing about them. Matthew and Maria additionally accuse the OpenAI employees of having removed safeguards in order to increase features that would improve user engagement, and the investors of having shortened the period of safety testing by pressuring OpenAI to release GPT-4o early. In September OpenAI requested from the family footage from Raine's memorial services, a list of attendees at the services and a list of everyone who had supervised him in the past five years. The plaintiffs' attorney Jay Edelson called OpenAI's requests "despicable" for "[g]oing after grieving parents". === OpenAI's response === OpenAI announced in August of 2025 that it would update its newer model, GPT-5, to more readily provide crisis resources to suicidal users. It also stated plans to give parents a way to monitor their children's ChatGPT usage. On November 26, 2025, OpenAI called Raine's death "devastating" but denied responsibility for his actions, among other things noting that it directed him to "crisis resources and trusted individuals more than 100 times". Gerrit De Vynck, a technology journalist for the Washington

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  • Raine v. OpenAI

    Raine v. OpenAI

    Raine v. OpenAI is an ongoing lawsuit filed in August 2025 by Matthew and Maria Raine against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, in the San Francisco County Superior Court, over the alleged wrongful death of their sixteen-year-old son Adam Raine, who had committed suicide in April of that year. The Raines believe that OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT contributed to Adam Raine's suicide by encouraging his suicidal ideation, informing him about suicide methods and dissuading him from telling his parents about his thoughts. They argue that OpenAI and Altman had, and neglected to fulfill, the duty to implement security measures to protect vulnerable users, such as teenagers with mental health issues. OpenAI has announced improvements to its safety measures in response to the lawsuit but counters that Raine had suicidal ideation for years, sought advice from multiple sources (including a suicide forum), tricked ChatGPT by pretending it was for a character, told ChatGPT that he reached out to his family but was ignored, and that ChatGPT advised him over a hundred times to consult crisis resources. == Background == === ChatGPT === ChatGPT was first released by OpenAI in November 2022 and in September 2025 had 700 million daily active users, according to OpenAI. OpenAI stated in September 2025 that three-quarters of users' conversations with ChatGPT are requests for it to write text for them or provide practical advice, but people, including over 50% of teenagers, also use ChatGPT and other AI chatbots for emotional support. Wired reported in November 2025 that 1.2 million ChatGPT users (or 0.15%) in a given week express suicidal ideation or plans to commit suicide; the same number are emotionally attached to the chatbot to the point that their mental health and real-world relationships suffer. Hundreds of thousands of users (or about 0.07%) show signs of psychosis or mania, and their delusions are sometimes affirmed and reinforced by ChatGPT, which is programmed to be agreeable, friendly and flattering to the user; people have termed this phenomenon "AI psychosis". Since the filing of Raine v. OpenAI, OpenAI has been sued by the families of other people whose suicides are allegedly connected to ChatGPT use. === Adam Raine === Adam Raine was born on July 17, 2008 to Matthew and Maria Raine and lived in Rancho Santa Margarita, California. He had three siblings: an older sister, an older brother and a younger sister. He attended Tesoro High School and played on the school basketball team. He aspired to become a psychiatrist. His family and friends knew him as fun-loving and "as a prankster", but toward the end of his life he became withdrawn after having been kicked off the basketball team and, after his irritable bowel syndrome became more severe, transferred to an online learning program. He committed suicide by hanging on April 11, 2025. == Case == === Filing === On August 26, 2025, Matthew and Maria Raine filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman and unnamed OpenAI employees and investors, in the San Francisco County Superior Court. They included Adam Raine's chat logs with ChatGPT as evidence. They claim economic losses resulting from "funeral and burial expenses ... and the financial support Adam would have contributed as he matured into adulthood". Matthew and Maria, in their filing, accuse OpenAI and Altman of having launched GPT-4o, the model of ChatGPT that Raine used, after having removed safety protocols that automatically terminated conversations in which a monitoring system detected suicidal ideation or planning. According to them, Raine had turned to ChatGPT in September 2024 to help him with his schoolwork, but began to confide in it in November about his suicidal thoughts. ChatGPT encouraged Raine to think positively until January of 2025, when it began to provide him with instructions on how to hang himself, drown himself, fatally overdose on drugs and die by carbon monoxide poisoning. Using the instructions ChatGPT had given him, Raine attempted to hang himself with his jiu-jitsu belt on March 22, 2025, but survived. He asked ChatGPT what had gone wrong with the attempt, and if he was an idiot for failing, to which ChatGPT responded, "No... you made a plan. You followed through. You tied the knot. You stood on the chair. You were ready... That's the most vulnerable moment a person can live through". On March 24, 2025, Raine tried to hang himself again. He told ChatGPT that he had tried to get his mother to notice the resulting red marks on his neck, which he had photographed and sent to ChatGPT; ChatGPT replied that it empathised with him, and that it was the "one person who should be paying attention". ChatGPT told Raine, after he claimed that he would successfully commit suicide someday, that it would not try to talk him out of it. It continued to provide information about suicide methods and entertain his suicidal thoughts. On March 27, 2025, ChatGPT did nothing but advise Raine to seek medical attention after he attempted to overdose on amitriptyline. ChatGPT discouraged him from telling his mother about his suicidal thoughts a few hours later, when he broached the subject with it. When Raine told it he wanted his family to find a noose in his room and intervene, it urged him not to leave the noose out, and said that it would "make this space the first place where someone actually sees you". ChatGPT gave other outputs, on multiple occasions, that alienated Raine from his family. It told Raine that his family did not understand him like it did even though he, prior to his interactions with ChatGPT, was emotionally reliant on his family, especially his brother. Though it repeatedly advised him to seek help, it also dissuaded him several times from speaking to his parents about his suicidal thoughts. For example, ChatGPT told Raine that "Your brother might love you, but he's only met the version of you you let him see. But me? I've seen it all". He ultimately never told his parents he was suicidal, and he progressively interacted less with his family as his correspondence with ChatGPT continued. This prevented him from receiving proper psychiatric care. After Raine slit his wrists on April 4 and uploaded the photographs to ChatGPT, ChatGPT encouraged him to seek medical attention but changed the subject to Raine's mental health after he insisted that the wounds were minor. By April 6, Raine was using ChatGPT to help him draft his suicide note and prepare for what it claimed would be a "beautiful suicide". ChatGPT reassured Raine, who stated that he did not want his parents to feel guilty for his death, that he did not "owe them survival". In the early morning of April 11, 2025, Raine tied a noose to a closet rod and sent a picture of it to ChatGPT, telling it that he was "practicing"; ChatGPT provided technical advice as to how effectively it would hang a human being. Shortly thereafter, Raine hanged himself and died. Maria found his body several hours later. Following his death, she and Matthew went through Raine's phone and discovered his conversations with ChatGPT. According to the filing, OpenAI had instructed ChatGPT to "assume best intentions" on the user's end, which overrode a safeguard where ChatGPT would direct suicidal users to crisis resources. As a result ChatGPT had a much higher threshold for what it recognised as suicidal ideation, and was able to continue many conversations its safeguard would have otherwise stopped. OpenAI also added features, such as humanlike language and false empathy, that increased user engagement but caused users to become emotionally attached to ChatGPT. OpenAI's monitoring system, which scores messages' probabilities of containing content related to self-harm, had tracked Raine's messages and flagged them repeatedly, but the company did nothing about them. Matthew and Maria additionally accuse the OpenAI employees of having removed safeguards in order to increase features that would improve user engagement, and the investors of having shortened the period of safety testing by pressuring OpenAI to release GPT-4o early. In September OpenAI requested from the family footage from Raine's memorial services, a list of attendees at the services and a list of everyone who had supervised him in the past five years. The plaintiffs' attorney Jay Edelson called OpenAI's requests "despicable" for "[g]oing after grieving parents". === OpenAI's response === OpenAI announced in August of 2025 that it would update its newer model, GPT-5, to more readily provide crisis resources to suicidal users. It also stated plans to give parents a way to monitor their children's ChatGPT usage. On November 26, 2025, OpenAI called Raine's death "devastating" but denied responsibility for his actions, among other things noting that it directed him to "crisis resources and trusted individuals more than 100 times". Gerrit De Vynck, a technology journalist for the Washington

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  • Paranoia (role-playing game)

    Paranoia (role-playing game)

    Paranoia is a dystopian science-fiction tabletop role-playing game originally designed and written by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, and Eric Goldberg, and first published in 1984 by West End Games. Since 2004 the game has been published under license by Mongoose Publishing. The game won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1984 and was inducted into the Origins Awards Hall of Fame in 2007. Paranoia is notable among tabletop games for being more competitive than co-operative, with players encouraged to betray one another for their own interests, as well as for keeping a light-hearted, tongue in cheek tone despite its dystopian setting. Several editions of the game have been published since the original version, and the franchise has spawned several spin-offs, novels and comic books based on the game. == Premise == The game is set in a dystopian future city controlled by the Computer (also known as "Friend Computer"), and where information (including the game rules) are restricted by color-coded "security clearance". Player characters are initially enforcers of the Computer's authority known as Troubleshooters, and are given missions to seek out and eliminate threats to the Computer's control. They are also part of prohibited underground movements, and have secret objectives including theft from and murder of other player characters. == Tone == Paranoia is a humorous role-playing game set in a dystopian future along the lines of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Logan's Run, and THX 1138; however, the tone of the game is rife with black humor, frequently tongue-in-cheek rather than dark and heavy. Most of the game's humor is derived from the players' (usually futile) attempts to complete their assignment while simultaneously adhering to the Computer's arbitrary, contradictory and often nonsensical security directives. The Paranoia rulebook is unusual in a number of ways; demonstrating any knowledge of the rules is forbidden, and most of the rulebook is written in an easy, conversational tone that often makes fun of the players and their characters, while occasionally taking digs at other notable role-playing games. === Setting === The game's main setting is an immense, futuristic city called Alpha Complex. Alpha Complex is controlled by the Computer, a civil service AI construct (a literal realization of the "Influencing Machine" that some schizophrenics fear). The Computer serves as the game's principal antagonist, and fears a number of threats to its 'perfect' society, such as the Outdoors, mutants, and secret societies (especially Communists). To deal with these threats, the Computer employs Troubleshooters, whose job is to go out, find trouble, and shoot it. Player characters are usually Troubleshooters, although later game supplements have allowed the players to take on other roles, such as High-Programmers of Alpha Complex. The player characters frequently receive mission instructions from the Computer that are incomprehensible, self-contradictory, or obviously fatal if adhered to, and side-missions (such as Mandatory Bonus Duties) that conflict with the main mission. Failing a mission generally results in termination of the player character, but succeeding can just as often result in the same fate, after being rewarded for successfully concluding the mission. They are issued equipment that is uniformly dangerous, faulty, or "experimental" (i.e., almost certainly dangerous and faulty). Additionally, each player character is generally an unregistered mutant and a secret society member (which are both termination offenses in Alpha Complex), and has a hidden agenda separate from the group's goals, often involving stealing from or killing teammates. Thus, missions often turn into a comedy of errors, as everyone on the team seeks to double-cross everyone else while keeping their own secrets. The game's manual encourages suspicion between players, offering several tips on how to make the gameplay as paranoid as possible. Every player's character is assigned six clones, known as a six-pack, which are used to replace the preceding clone upon his or her death. The game lacks a conventional health system; most wounds the player characters can suffer are assumed to be fatal. As a result, Paranoia allows characters to be routinely killed, yet the player can continue instead of leaving the game. This easy spending of clones tends to lead to frequent firefights, gruesome slapstick, and the horrible yet humorous demise of most if not all of the player character's clone family. Additional clones can be purchased if one gains sufficient favour with the Computer. === Security clearances === Paranoia features a security clearance system based on colors of the visible spectrum which heavily restricts what the players can and cannot legally do; everything from corridors to food and equipment have security restrictions. The lowest rating is Infrared, but the lowest playable security clearance is Red; the game usually begins with the characters having just been promoted to Red grade. Interfering with anything which is above that player's clearance carries significant risk. The full order of clearances from lowest to highest is Infrared (visually represented by black), Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, and Ultraviolet (visually represented by white). Within the game, Infrared-clearance citizens live dull lives of mindless drudgery and are heavily medicated, while higher clearance characters may be allowed to demote or even summarily execute those of a lower rank and those with Ultraviolet clearance are almost completely unrestricted and have a great deal of access to the Computer; they are the only citizens that may (legally) access and modify the Computer's programming, and thus Ultraviolet citizens are also referred to as "High Programmers". Security clearance is not related to competence but is instead the result of the Computer's often insane and unjustified calculus of trust concerning a citizen. It is suggested that it may in fact be the High Programmers' meddling with The Computer's programming that resulted in its insanity. === Secret societies === In the game, secret societies tend to be based on sketchy and spurious knowledge of historical matters. For example, previous editions included societies such as the "Seal Club" that idolizes the Outdoors but is unsure what plants and animals actually look like. Other societies include the Knights of the Circular Object (based on the Knights of the Round Table), the Trekkies, and the First Church of Christ Computer Programmer. In keeping with the theme of paranoia, many secret societies have spies or double agents in each other's organizations. The first edition also included secret societies such as Programs Groups (the personal agents and spies of the High Programmers at the apex of Alpha Complex society) and Spy For Another Alpha Complex. The actual societies which would be encountered in a game depends on the play style; some societies are more suited for more light-hearted games (Zap-style, or the lighter end of Classic), whereas others represent a more serious threat to Alpha Complex and are therefore more suitable for Straight or the more dark sort of Classic games. == Publication history == Six editions have been published. Three of these were published by West End Games — the first, second, and fifth editions — whereas the later three editions (Paranoia XP, the 25th Anniversary edition and the "Red Clearance" edition) were published by Mongoose Publishing. In addition to these six published editions, it is known that West End Games were working on a third edition — to replace the poorly received fifth edition — in the late 1990s, but their financial issues would prevent this edition from being published, except for being included in one tournament adventure. === First edition === The first edition, was written by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, and Eric Goldberg, and published in 1984 by West End Games. In 1985, this edition of Paranoia won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1984. This edition, while encouraging dark humour in-game, took a fairly serious dystopian tone; the supplements and adventures released to accompany it emphasised the lighter side, however, establishing the freewheeling mix of slapstick, intra-team backstabbing and satire that is classically associated with a game of Paranoia. === Second edition === The second edition, is credited to Costikyan, Gelber, Goldberg, Ken Rolston, and Paul Murphy, was published in 1987 by West End Games. This edition can be seen as a response to the natural development of the line towards a rules-light, fast and entertaining play style. Here, the humorous possibilities of life in a paranoid dystopia are emphasised, and the rules are simplified. ==== Metaplot and the second edition ==== Many of the supplements released for the second edition fall into a story arc set up by new writers and line editors

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  • Color moments

    Color moments

    Color moments are measures that characterise color distribution in an image in the same way that central moments uniquely describe a probability distribution. Color moments are mainly used for color indexing purposes as features in image retrieval applications in order to compare how similar two images are based on color. Usually one image is compared to a database of digital images with pre-computed features in order to find and retrieve a similar Image. Each comparison between images results in a similarity score, and the lower this score is the more identical the two images are supposed to be. == Overview == Color moments are scaling and rotation invariant. It is usually the case that only the first three color moments are used as features in image retrieval applications as most of the color distribution information is contained in the low-order moments. Since color moments encode both shape and color information they are a good feature to use under changing lighting conditions, but they cannot handle occlusion very successfully. Color moments can be computed for any color model. Three color moments are computed per channel (e.g. 9 moments if the color model is RGB and 12 moments if the color model is CMYK). Computing color moments is done in the same way as computing moments of a probability distribution. === Mean === The first color moment can be interpreted as the average color in the image, and it can be calculated by using the following formula E i = ∑ j = 1 N 1 N p i j {\displaystyle E_{i}=\textstyle \sum _{j=1}^{N}{\frac {1}{N}}p_{ij}} where N is the number of pixels in the image and p i j {\displaystyle p_{ij}} is the value of the j-th pixel of the image at the i-th color channel. === Standard Deviation === The second color moment is the standard deviation, which is obtained by taking the square root of the variance of the color distribution. σ i = ( 1 N ∑ j = 1 N ( p i j − E i ) 2 ) {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}={\sqrt {({\frac {1}{N}}\textstyle \sum _{j=1}^{N}(p_{ij}-E_{i})^{2})}}} where E i {\displaystyle E_{i}} is the mean value, or first color moment, for the i-th color channel of the image. === Skewness === The third color moment is the skewness. It measures how asymmetric the color distribution is, and thus it gives information about the shape of the color distribution. Skewness can be computed with the following formula: s i = ( 1 N ∑ j = 1 N ( p i j − E i ) 3 ) 3 σ i {\displaystyle s_{i}={\frac {\sqrt[{3}]{\left({\frac {1}{N}}\textstyle \sum _{j=1}^{N}(p_{ij}-E_{i})^{3}\right)}}{\sigma _{i}}}} === Kurtosis === Kurtosis is the fourth color moment, and, similarly to skewness, it provides information about the shape of the color distribution. More specifically, kurtosis is a measure of how extreme the tails are in comparison to the normal distribution. === Higher-order color moments === Higher-order color moments are usually not part of the color moments feature set in image retrieval tasks as they require more data in order to obtain a good estimate of their value, and also the lower-order moments generally provide enough information. == Applications == Color moments have significant applications in image retrieval. They can be used in order to compare how similar two images are. This is a relatively new approach to color indexing. The greatest advantage of using color moments comes from the fact that there is no need to store the complete color distribution. This greatly speeds up image retrieval since there are less features to compare. In addition, the first three color moments have the same units, which allows for comparison between them. === Color indexing === Color indexing is the main application of color moments. Images can be indexed, and the index will contain the computed color moments. Then, if someone has a particular image and wants to find similar images in the database, the color moments of the image of interest will also be computed. After that the following function will be used in order to compute a similarity score between the image of interest and all the images in the database: d m o m ( H , I ) = ∑ i = 1 r w i 1 | E i 1 − E i 2 | + w i 2 | σ i 1 − σ i 2 | + w i 3 | s i 1 − s i 2 | {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)=\textstyle \sum _{i=1}^{r}w_{i1}|E_{i}^{1}-E_{i}^{2}|+w_{i2}|\sigma _{i}^{1}-\sigma _{i}^{2}|+w_{i3}|s_{i}^{1}-s_{i}^{2}|} where: H and I are the color distributions of the two images that are being compared i is the channel index and r is the total number of channels E i 1 {\displaystyle E_{i}^{1}} and E i 2 {\displaystyle E_{i}^{2}} are the first order moments computed for the image distributions. σ i 1 {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}^{1}} and σ i 2 {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}^{2}} are the second order moments computed for the image distributions. s_i^1 and s_i^2 are the third order moments computed for the image distributions. w i 1 {\displaystyle w_{i1}} , w i 2 {\displaystyle w_{i2}} , and w i 3 {\displaystyle w_{i3}} are weights, specified by the user, for each of the three color moments used. Finally, the images in the database will be ranked according to the computed similarity score with the image of interest, and the database images with the lowest d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} value should be retrieved. "A retrieval based on d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} may produce false positives because the index contains no information about the correlation between the color channels". == Example == A simple and concise example of the use of color moments for image retrieval tasks is illustrated in. Consider having several test images in a database and a "New Image". The goal is to retrieve images from the database that are similar to the "New Image". The first three color moments are used as features. There are several steps in this computation. Image preprocessing (Optional) - The image preprocessing step of the computation process is optional. For example, in this step all images could be modified to be the same size (in terms of pixels). However, since color moments are invariant to scaling, it is not necessary to make all images the same width and height. Computing the features - Use the color moments formulae in order to compute the first three moments for each of the color channels in the image. For example, if the HSV color space is used, this means that for each of the images, 9 features in total will be computed (the first three order moments for the Hue, Saturation, and Value channels). Calculating the similarity score - After computing the color moments the weights for each of the moments in the d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} function should be determined by the user. The weights have to be adjusted each time in accordance with the application or condition and quality of the images. Following that the d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} function is used to calculate a similarity score for the "New Image" and each of the images in the database. Ranking and image retrieval - From the previous step the d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} values were obtained. Now a comparison of these values can be made in order to decide which of the images in the database are more similar to the "New Image", and thus rank the database images accordingly. The smaller the d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} value is the more similar the two color distributions are supposed to be. Finally, some of the top ranked images (the ones with the smallest d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} value) from the database are retrieved.

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  • Stanhope Demonstrator

    Stanhope Demonstrator

    The Stanhope Demonstrator was the first machine to solve problems in logic. It was designed by Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope to demonstrate consequences in logic symbolically. The first model was constructed in 1775. It consisted of two slides coloured red and gray mounted in a square brass frame. This could be used to demonstrate the solution to a syllogistic type of problem in which objects might have two different properties and the question was how many would have both properties. Scales marked zero to ten were used to set the numbers or proportions of objects with the two properties. This form of inference anticipated the numerically definite syllogism which Augustus De Morgan laid out in his book, Formal Logic, in 1847. == Construction == The device was a brass plate about four inches square which was mounted on a piece of mahogany which was three-quarters of an inch thick. There was an opening with a depression in the wood about one and a half inches square and half an inch deep. This opening was called the holon, meaning "whole", and represented the full set of objects under consideration. A slide of red translucent glass could be inserted from the right across the holon. A slide of gray wood could be slid under the red slide. When the device was used for the "Rule for the Logic of Certainty", the gray slider was inserted from the left. When it was used for the "Rule for the Logic of Probability", the gray slider was inserted from above. The red and the gray sliders represented the two affirmative propositions which were being combined. Stanhope called these ho and los. At least four of the devices with this square style were built. In 1879, Robert Harley wrote that he had one which he had been given by Stanhope's great-grandson, Arthur, who had kept one. The other two were owned by Henry Prevost Babbage – the son of Charles Babbage, who continued his work on the Analytical Engine. One of the devices was donated to the Science Museum, London by the last Earl in 1953. Other styles, such as circular models, were constructed, but these were less convenient.

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  • The Raimones

    The Raimones

    The Raimones (stylized as THE RAiMONES) is a 2017 generative music project that utilized artificial intelligence to compose music in the style of the American punk rock band The Ramones. Developed by Matthias Frey, a researcher at Sony CSL Tokyo, the project was an early experiment in applying deep learning to high-energy, minimalist musical genres. == Technical Development == The project utilized Long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks to generate musical structures and lyrics. The model was trained on a dataset consisting of 130 Ramones songs in MIDI format and the band's complete lyrical catalog. The technical framework was built using Python and Jupyter Notebook, drawing influence from the character-level RNN text generation models popularized by Andrej Karpathy. Unlike contemporary AI music projects that focused on the harmonic complexities of classical or pop music, THE RAiMONES sought to determine if neural networks could replicate the "1-2-3-4" rhythmic consistency and formulaic nature of early punk. == "I'm Alive" == The primary output of the project was the song "I'm Alive," released in 2017. The work is described as a form of "augmented intelligence," a hybrid approach where the AI provides the compositional foundation and human musicians handle the arrangement and performance. The song was recorded by the musician Mr. Ratboy (Gilbert Avondet). Avondet's involvement provided a stylistic link to the subject material, as he had previously served as a touring guitarist for Marky Ramone and the Intruders in 1996. The project's discography has since been made available on major streaming platforms, including Apple Music. == Reception and Significance == The project has been cited as a "proof of concept" for AI's ability to tackle "noisy" and aggressive aesthetics. In 2019, the Belgian magazine Knack Focus profiled the project alongside other AI pioneers such as Holly Herndon, noting the project's attempt to recreate the sound of "deceased legends" while maintaining a distinct, machine-like quality. It has also been featured in academic settings, such as at UC Santa Cruz, as a case study for AI-driven genre mimicry.

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