AI Dungeon is a single-player/multiplayer text adventure game which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate content and allows players to create and share adventures and custom prompts. The game's first version was made available in May 2019, and its second version (initially called AI Dungeon 2) was released on Google Colaboratory in December 2019. It was later ported that same month to its current cross-platform web application. The AI model was then reformed in July 2020. == Gameplay == AI Dungeon is a text adventure game that uses artificial intelligence to generate random storylines in response to player-submitted stimuli. In the game, players are prompted to choose a setting for their adventure (e.g. fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, cyberpunk, zombies), followed by other options relevant to the setting (such as character class for fantasy settings). After beginning an adventure, four main interaction methods can be chosen for the player's text input: Do: Must be followed by a verb, allowing the player to perform an action. Say: Must be followed by dialogue sentences, allowing players to communicate with other characters. Story: Can be followed by sentences describing something that happens to progress the story, or that players want the AI to know for future events. See: Must be followed by a description, allowing the player to perceive events, objects, or characters. Using this command creates an AI generated image, and does not affect gameplay. The game adapts and responds to most actions the player enters. Providing blank inputs can be used to prompt the AI to generate further content, and the game also provides players with options to undo or redo or modify recent events to improve the game's narrative. Players can also tell the AI what elements to "remember" for reference in future parts of their playthrough. === User-generated content === In addition to AI Dungeon's pre-configured settings, players can create custom "adventures" from scratch by describing the setting in text format, which the AI will then generate a setting from. These custom adventures can be published for others to play, with an interface for browsing published adventures and leaving comments under them. === Multiplayer === AI Dungeon includes a multiplayer mode in which different players each have their own character and take turns interacting with the AI within the same game session. Multiplayer supports both online play across multiple devices or local play using a shared device. The game's hosts are able to supervise the AI and modify its output. Unlike the single-player game, in which actions and stories use second person narration, multiplayer game stories are presented using third-person narration. === Worlds === AI Dungeon allows players to set their adventures within specific "Worlds" that give context to the broader environment where the adventure takes place. This feature was first released with two different worlds available for selection: Xaxas, a "world of peace and prosperity"; and Kedar, a "world of dragons, demons, and monsters". == Development == === AI Dungeon Classic (Early GPT-2) === The first version of AI Dungeon (sometimes referred to as AI Dungeon Classic) was designed and created by Nick Walton of Brigham Young University's "Perception, Control, and Cognition" deep learning laboratory in March 2019 during a hackathon. Before this, Walton had been working as an intern for several companies in the field of autonomous vehicles. This creation used an early version of the GPT-2 natural-language-generating neural network, created by OpenAI, allowing it to generate its original adventure narratives. During his first interactions with GPT-2, Walton was partly inspired by the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), which he had played for the first time with his family a few months earlier: I realized that there were no games available that gave you the same freedom to do anything that I found in [Dungeons & Dragons] ... You can be so creative compared to other games. This led him to wonder if an AI could function as a dungeon master. Unlike later versions of AI Dungeon, the original did not allow players to specify any action they wanted. Instead, it generated a finite list of possible actions to choose from. This first version of the game was released to the public in May 2019. It is not to be confused with another GPT-2-based adventure game, GPT Adventure, created by Northwestern University neuroscience postgraduate student Nathan Whitmore, also released on Google Colab several months after the public release of AI Dungeon. === AI Dungeon 2 (Full GPT-2) === In November 2019, a new, "full" version of GPT-2 was released by OpenAI. This new model included support for 1.5 billion parameters (which determine the accuracy with which a machine learning model can perform a task), compared with the 126 million parameter version used in the earliest stages of AI Dungeon's development. The game was recreated by Walton, leveraging this new version of the model, and temporarily rebranded as AI Dungeon 2. AI Dungeon 2's AI was given more focused training compared to its predecessor, using genre-specific text. This training material included approximately 30 megabytes of content web-scraped from chooseyourstory.com (an online community website of content inspired by interactive gamebooks, written by contributors of multiple skill levels, using logic of differing complexity) and multiple D&D rulebooks and adventures. The new version was released in December 2019 as open-source software available on GitHub. It was accessible via Google Colab, an online tool for data scientists and AI researchers that allows for free execution of code on Google-hosted machines. It could also be run locally on a PC, but in both cases, it required players to download the full model, around 5 gigabytes of data. Within days of the initial release, this mandatory download resulted in bandwidth charges of over $20,000, forcing the temporary shut-down of the game until a peer-to-peer alternative solution was established. Due to the game's sudden and explosive growth that same month, however, it became closed-source, proprietary software and was relaunched by Walton's start-up development team, Latitude (with Walton taking on the role of CTO). This relaunch constituted mobile apps for iOS and Android (built by app developer Braydon Batungbacal) on December 17. Other members of this team included Thorsten Kreutz for the game's long-term strategy and the creator's brother, Alan Walton, for hosting infrastructure. At this time, Nick Walton also established a Patreon campaign to support the game's further growth (such as the addition of multiplayer and voice support, along with longer-term plans to include music and image content) and turn the game into a commercial endeavor, which Walton felt was necessary to cover the costs of delivering a higher-quality version of the game. AI Dungeon was one of the only known commercial applications to be based upon GPT-2. Following its first announcement in December 2019, a multiplayer mode was added to the game in April 2020. Hosting a game in this mode was originally restricted to premium subscribers, although any players could join a hosted game. === Dragon model release (GPT-3) === In July 2020, the developers introduced a premium-exclusive version of the AI model, named Dragon, which uses OpenAI's API for leveraging the GPT-3 model without maintaining a local copy (released on June 11, 2020). GPT-3 was trained with 570 gigabytes of text content (approximately one trillion words, with a $12 million development cost) and can support 175 billion parameters, compared to the 40 gigabytes of training content and 1.5 billion parameters of GPT-2. The free model was also upgraded to a less-advanced version of GPT-3 and was named Griffin. Speaking shortly after this release, on the differences between GPT-2 and GPT-3, Walton stated: [GPT-3 is] one of the most powerful AI models in the world... It's just much more coherent in terms of understanding who the characters are, what they're saying, what's going on in the story and just being able to write an interesting and believable story. In the latter half of 2020, the "Worlds" feature was added to AI Dungeon, providing players with a selection of overarching worlds in which their adventures can take place. In February 2021, it was announced that AI Dungeon's developers, Latitude, had raised $3.3 million in seed funding (led by NFX, with participation from Album VC and Griffin Gaming Partners) to "build games with 'infinite' story possibilities." This funding intended to move AI content creation beyond the purely text-based nature of AI Dungeon as it existed at the time. After its announcement on August 20, a new "See" interaction mode was made available for all players and added to the game on August 30, 2022. AI Dungeon was retired from Steam on March 12, 2024. == Reception == Approximate
Jordan Antiquities Database and Information System
The Jordan Antiquities Database and Information System (JADIS) was a computer database of antiquities in Jordan, the first of its kind in the Arab world. It was established by the Department of Antiquities in 1990, in cooperation with the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman and sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development. JADIS was in use until 2002, when it was superseded by a new system, MEGA-J. Over 10,841 antiquities were registered in the database. An introduction and printed summary of the database was published by the Department of Antiquities in 1994, edited by Gaetano Palumbo.
Kubeflow
Kubeflow is an open-source platform for machine learning and MLOps on Kubernetes introduced by Google. The different stages in a typical machine learning lifecycle are represented with different software components in Kubeflow, including model development (Kubeflow Notebooks), model training (Kubeflow Pipelines, Kubeflow Training Operator), model serving (KServe), and automated machine learning (Katib). Each component of Kubeflow can be deployed separately, and it is not a requirement to deploy every component. == History == The Kubeflow project was first announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017 by Google engineers David Aronchick, Jeremy Lewi, and Vishnu Kannan to address a perceived lack of flexible options for building production-ready machine learning systems. The project has also stated it began as a way for Google to open-source how they ran TensorFlow internally. The first release of Kubeflow (Kubeflow 0.1) was announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Kubeflow 1.0 was released in March 2020 via a public blog post announcing that many Kubeflow components were graduating to a "stable status", indicating they were now ready for production usage. In October 2022, Google announced that the Kubeflow project had applied to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. In July 2023, the foundation voted to accept Kubeflow as an incubating stage project. == Components == === Kubeflow Notebooks for model development === Machine learning models are developed in the notebooks component called Kubeflow Notebooks. The component runs web-based development environments inside a Kubernetes cluster, with native support for Jupyter Notebook, Visual Studio Code, and RStudio. === Kubeflow Pipelines for model training === Once developed, models are trained in the Kubeflow Pipelines component. The component acts as a platform for building and deploying portable, scalable machine learning workflows based on Docker containers. Google Cloud Platform has adopted the Kubeflow Pipelines DSL within its Vertex AI Pipelines product. === Kubeflow Training Operator for model training === For certain machine learning models and libraries, the Kubeflow Training Operator component provides Kubernetes custom resources support. The component runs distributed or non-distributed TensorFlow, PyTorch, Apache MXNet, XGBoost, and MPI training jobs on Kubernetes. === KServe for model serving === The KServe component (previously named KFServing) provides Kubernetes custom resources for serving machine learning models on arbitrary frameworks including TensorFlow, XGBoost, scikit-learn, PyTorch, and ONNX. KServe was developed collaboratively by Google, IBM, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, and Seldon. Publicly disclosed adopters of KServe include Bloomberg, Gojek, the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. === Katib for automated machine learning === Lastly, Kubeflow includes a component for automated training and development of machine learning models, the Katib component. It is described as a Kubernetes-native project and features hyperparameter tuning, early stopping, and neural architecture search. == Release timeline ==
Generalized multidimensional scaling
Generalized multidimensional scaling (GMDS) is an extension of metric multidimensional scaling, in which the target space is non-Euclidean. When the dissimilarities are distances on a surface and the target space is another surface, GMDS allows finding the minimum-distortion embedding of one surface into another. GMDS is an emerging research direction. Currently, main applications are recognition of deformable objects (e.g. for three-dimensional face recognition) and texture mapping.
Transkribus
Transkribus is a platform for the text recognition, image analysis and structure recognition of historical documents. The platform was created in the context of the two EU projects "tranScriptorium" (2013–2015) and "READ" (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents – 2016–2019). It was developed by the University of Innsbruck. Since July 1, 2019 the platform has been directed and further developed by the READ-COOP, a non-profit cooperative. The platform integrates tools developed by research groups throughout Europe, including the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) group of the Technical University of Valencia and the Computational Intelligence Technology Lab (CITlab) group of University of Rostock. Comparable programs that offer similar functions are eScriptorium and OCR4All.
Association for Computational Linguistics
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language processing research, along with EMNLP. The conference is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out. It was founded in 1962, originally named the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). It became the ACL in 1968. The ACL has a European (EACL), a North American (NAACL), and an Asian (AACL) chapter. == History == The ACL was founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). The initial membership was about 100. In 1965, the AMTCL took over the journal Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics. This journal was succeeded by many other journals: the American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1974–1978, 1980–1983), and then Computational Linguistics (1984–present). Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by MIT Press. The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery National Conference. The annual meeting was, for a long time, relatively informal and did not publish anything longer than abstracts. By 1968, the society took on its current name, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The publication of the annual meeting's Proceedings of the ACL began in 1979 and gradually matured into its modern form. Many of the meetings were held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and a few with the American Society for Information Science and the Cognitive Science Society. The United States government sponsored much research from 1989 to 1994, characterized by an increase in author retention rates and an increase in research in some key topics, such as speech recognition, in ACL. By the 21st century, it was able to maintain authors at a high rate who coalesced in a more stable arrangement around individual research topics. In 1991, the group published a prototype for a text generator based on the universal grammar theory of Noam Chomsky. The system, nicknamed Parrot, relied on a finite set of syntactic transformations and a hand-curated lexicon. Despite some initial success, including experimentation with morpheme syntactics, funding halted after the research team encountered intractable difficulties with inflection and abstract locutions. == Annual Meeting of the ACL == Every year, the ACL holds the Annual Meeting of the ACL. The location lies in Europe in years zero modulo three, North America in years one modulo three, and Asia–Australia in years two modulo three. In 2020, the Annual Meeting received for the first time more submissions from China than the United States. == Activities == The ACL organizes several of the top conferences and workshops in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing. These include: Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the flagship conference of the organization Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), held jointly one of the other conferences on a rotating basis Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) Lexical and Computational Semantics and Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (SEM) Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT) Besides conferences, the ACL also sponsors the journals Computational Linguistics and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). Papers and other presentations at ACL and ACL-affiliated venues are archived online in the open-access ACL Anthology. == Special Interest Groups == ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), focusing on specific areas of natural language processing. Some current SIGs within ACL are: == Presidents == Each year, the ACL elects a distinguished computational linguist who becomes vice-president of the organization in the next calendar year and president one year later. Recent ACL presidents are:
Witness set
In combinatorics and computational learning theory, a witness set is a set of elements that distinguishes a given Boolean function from a given class of other Boolean functions. Let C {\displaystyle C} be a concept class over a domain X {\displaystyle X} (that is, a family of Boolean functions over X {\displaystyle X} ) and c {\displaystyle c} be a concept in X {\displaystyle X} (a single Boolean function). A subset S {\displaystyle S} of X {\displaystyle X} is a witness set for c {\displaystyle c} in X {\displaystyle X} if S {\displaystyle S} distinguishes c {\displaystyle c} from all the other functions in C {\displaystyle C} , in the sense that no other function in C {\displaystyle C} has the same values on S {\displaystyle S} . For a concept class with | C | {\displaystyle |C|} concepts, there exists a concept that has a witness of size at most log 2 | C | {\displaystyle \log _{2}|C|} ; this bound is tight when C {\displaystyle C} consists of all Boolean functions over X {\displaystyle X} . By a result of Bondy (1972) there exists a single witness set of size at most | C | − 1 {\displaystyle |C|-1} that is valid for all concepts in C {\displaystyle C} ; this bound is tight when C {\displaystyle C} consists of the indicator functions of the empty set and some singleton sets. One way to construct this set is to interpret the concepts as bitstrings, and the domain elements as positions in these bitstrings. Then the set of positions at which a trie of the bitstrings branches forms the desired witness set. This construction is central to the operation of the fusion tree data structure. The minimum size of a witness set for c {\displaystyle c} is called the witness size or specification number and is denoted by w C ( c ) {\displaystyle w_{C}(c)} . The value max { w C ( c ) : c ∈ C } {\displaystyle \max\{w_{C}(c):c\in C\}} is called the teaching dimension of C {\displaystyle C} . It represents the number of examples of a concept that need to be presented by a teacher to a learner, in the worst case, to enable the learner to determine which concept is being presented. Witness sets have also been called teaching sets, keys, specifying sets, or discriminants. The "witness set" terminology is from Kushilevitz et al. (1996), who trace the concept of witness sets to work by Cover (1965).