Research: A FPS which recognizes your actions to adapt itself

February 25, 2010

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Category: Gaming, Technoglogy

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Research: A FPS which recognizes your actions to adapt itself

You buy a new game and the first step you meet with your game play is the “difficulty” setting. You pick the best estimated difficulty and start playing, to only realize later that this setting is either too easy or too tough. Ever felt, “I wish there was a setting between easy and medium”? Can walkthroughs be made obsolete?

Unreal Tournament
Few games (Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Lego Star Wars II) have tried to handle situations like above by making the game harder according to the gamers success, however they do not respond to specific advanced skill sets possesed by the player or the lack of.

Most non player characters (NPCs) are built with a very limited set of capabilities and navigation. A different or unconventional approach used by a gamer often leaves NPCs lost. For example, in several FPS, advanced gamers would seek a good & safe vantage point which attracts a good number of opponents (NPCs) to take them down off-guard (spawn camping, sniping etc). Gamers engage in this as they see a lot of opponents in the vicinity, they have got a good vantage point and they are sure that the AI of the game would keep sending almost all of the NPCs in the vicinity (in most cases through the same path). How interesting would the game be, if the AI was able to detect that the gamer now has a vantage point, lure him into a different/difficult location rather than sending more NPCs. Considering a novice gamer who lands up with no ammunition very quickly, if the AI could see that the gamer was wasting way too much ammunition, control the power of the autonomous weapons to limit the ammunition wastage when there is no NPC in clear view and thus lessen the frustration the gamer would experience.

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Do you know that TWO out of FIVE cancers are preventable?

February 5, 2010

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Category: Health, Science

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Do you know that TWO out of FIVE cancers are preventable?

Feb 4, 2010 marked the World Cancer Day. The message got out to the world was all in sync – a good percentage of cancers are preventable.


VaccinationCancer is a leading cause of death, contributing to about one in every eight deaths worldwide and that is HIV, malaria and TB combined. While the fear for this killer is omnipresent, awareness about prevention is not. While cancer by itself is noncommunicable, about twenty-one percent of cancers are due to infections. Cervical and liver cancers are mainly due to such infections.