SciTechBits – Interesting Bits of Science & Technoglogy Served For You!

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?


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.

What would work best against digital piracy, in a country which is culturally very different from the States? This was the question, researchers wanted to address. To no surprise, just as in US, legal options against the pirates do not help at all, but two other factors seem to significantly help.


In a developing Gulf country filled with moderate and conservative Muslims, piracy is just a very normal affair. Pirated CDs and DVDs could be easily obtained, though not on public display after recent pressure from US through WTO etc. The cultural differences between this country and USA are well documented and are several folds. This raised the question to the researchers, if this cultural change will give a different way to approach the fight against digital piracy.

In a business college in Kuwait, researchers recruited 12 classes of students (319 students). They were then split into four groups with each group consisting of a freshman, a sophomore and a junior level class in it. All groups were given a pre-questionnaire at the beginning of the semester, which evaluated their intention to pirate in the near future. At the ending of the semester, except for one group (control group) every other group got a treatment (a statement being read in the class). The legal/law group was informed about the new laws/regulations/enforcements of new laws related to digital piracy. The religion group was informed about a new edict/fatwa which considers digital piracy to be immoral from a religious point of view. The last group, awareness group was informed about the consequences of piracy. Upon the “treatment”, all of the groups were administered the post-questionnaire, which again evaluated their intention to pirate in the near future.

We are not sure if this is true or a joke, however this video clip shows an ex-employee from Microsoft claiming that he was fired for not pronouncing “Bing” in a way Stevel Ballmer likes. True or not, it’s funny as hell!

Researchers have developed a very accurate and robust model to classify any given webpage as a blog, newspaper site, forum, FAQ, e-shop, listing, personal home page etc and this would extend the limited search results classification (e.g., Google News) available now.

Search results classified by genre are not something new; however most of the classification is manual. For instance, sites/pages listed in Google News are manually submitted and approved links, rather than auto classification. Manual classification of every single page on the web into several genres is impossible. Such a classification will help users easily access information based on very specific needs.

A group of researchers from Greece have implemented and tested a model, which used textual and structural information. This combination of information has leaded to a very high accuracy (96.5%) on the tests conducted. Previous attempts on this had limited success due to the lack of pre classified list of websites for testing.

The research used two different set of classifications (corpora) named 7Genre and KI-04. 7Genre had seven different genres – blog, e-shop, FAQs, online newspaper frontpage, listing, personal home page and search page, with each group having 200 pages for testing and training of the model. KI-04 had eight genres – article, download, link collection, portrayal-private, discussion, help, portrayal-non private and shop. Both of these corpora were used to auto train the model and then test on the success of the model.

To test the robustness of this method, cross testing was performed as well, where in training was done on one corpora and testing was done on a different corpora. Such a setup helped identify the possibilities of using such a system in a real life situation. This testing also produced significantly accurate results.

This model does not need any manual selection of features that best capture the stylistic properties of text or structure of webpages. This enables adapting to specific properties of either a given general or focused collection of genres. The time taken for training is analogous to the size of the corpus; however the cross check experiments show that training on smaller and different corpora is sufficient enough for training. The auto training enables evolving of the model to the ever changing web and can be used for any language.

RIAA and anti-p2p companies have constantly engaged in various methods to thwart sharing of albums and movies over BitTorrent. Detailed research on one of the popular methods (leecher attack) has proven that, the time and money spent on this method is just a waste. The researchers also suggest methods to completely nullify these attacks.

With law suits against BitTorrent users being very unpopular and legal action against every tracker being impossible, RIAA and record labels have long been using anti-p2p companies such as Media Defender, Safenet and Macrovision to engage in online attacks on various components of the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Of the many attacks used, a few are popular. Seeder attack focuses on attacking the seeder (uploader), in order to prevent the file reaching other users; however this attack needs to initiated at the very early stages of protecting an album or movie from propagating and seeders are usually experienced p2p users. Tracker attack involves flooding the tracker, however most trackers employ high bandwidth servers and many BitTorrent clients have employed other mechanisms such as distributed hash tables and gossips (letting other peers know about the peers discovered by a client). Uploading fake torrents to trackers is one other method used, however this only just frustrates the users but does not prevent or block the sharing of their valued content. Leecher attack is one of the most popular attack, for that it attempts to attack the majority of the BitTorrent ecosystem, the users actively downloading parts of a movie or album. Researchers have paid special attention to leecher attacks, due to this reason.

Researchers have demonstrated that with minimum efforts and skill, teachers can create educational serious games, by just modding existing first person shooter games, which are very popular among students. Students who tested felt that, this could be used in high schools, however male testers reacted different as compared to female testers.

Gaming technology has been heavily focused on “entertainment games”, while the other type of games – “serious games”, are heavily ignored mainly due to the less monetary profit got from them. Educational serious games, whose purpose is to be educative, have been characterized with realistic activities, such as performing experiments in a laboratory or the like. However the games as such do not offer anything interesting (other than education) as compared to the entertainment games, especially first person shooters. First person shooters are very popular among students and are usually very task/mission oriented. Teachers and researchers have been hoping to tap into this interest among students towards the first person shooters, to use them for educative purposes.

However, game development is not an easy task and involves heavy resources, which makes it almost impossible for teachers to handle with. A group of researchers saw this need and decided to try to mod an existing game and test the efficiency. Unreal Tournament is already popular among the research community and has been analyzed for it physics capabilities, suggesting that UnrealEd (the map editor of the game) could be used in classrooms to demonstrate various physics theories and properties.

Online auctions open up opportunities for several types of frauds. A particular type, which facilitates illegal loans, is on the rise in several nations. Researchers have analyzed these cases to find patterns, which could help identify them, including other types of auction frauds.

As the internet reach broadens, more and more people have started to use online auctioning (EBay). Along with this growth, fraud also keeps growing. 2007 alone saw about $14.37M in auction fraud. Misrepresentation of items, fake bids by the seller to drive up the price, adding hidden charges (shipping & handling, insurance), non-delivery of items and offering black market goods are just some of the well known online auction frauds.

A particular type of fraud is very prevalent in Korea and is also found in most other markets – Online Credit Card Phantom Transactions (OCCPT). In this type of fraud, the seller and buyer collude to create a fake transaction, there by resulting in money (loan) got from the credit card company at a relatively very low interest rate, as compared to other options. This fraud is done in situations where, a person is not able to secure any forms of legal loans, interest rate of available loans are very high or cash advance limit on the credit card is very low compared to the purchase limit. Finally, the buyer (the owner of the credit card) could pay or not pay the credit card company.

A group of researchers are reporting on a new setup, which could finally result in every facial expression made by a gamer be cloned to the avatars face. The results produced by this method are truly amazing. Commercialization of this could be a big change in multiplayer game’s immersiveness.

Immersiveness has played a significant role in games development over the recent times. Game producers have engaged every possible technique to make the gamers feel deeply involved with the game. Customization of the gaming character (avatar) is one such method, where in the gamer feels more involved when the avatar has been customized to look like him/her or to his/her liking.

Multiplayer games have taken gaming to the next level, as the gamers get to compete with real people in real time. Most multiplayer games include chat, emoticons and VOIP for letting the gamers exchange their emotions/feelings over the game. Consider one gamer wearing extra strong body armor is being shot by an enemy with a very tiny gun. Chat, emoticons or VOIP could not really carry over the expressions or emotions of these players, would it not be awesome to see the player (avatar) being shot – laughing hard in this situation. This should be possible very soon, as a group of researchers have designed a setup which makes this possible.

With the recent constant increase in internet related energy consumption, researchers are trying to address one main contributing factor – Running PCs 24/7 to run BitTorrents. A new architecture is being proposed to reduce the energy consumption and also reduce the download time. While promising, the architecture comes with a major limitation.

It is estimated that 74 TeraWatts hours (TWh) per year of electricity is consumed by internet. This 74 TWh is comprised of the energy consumed at data centers as well as the individual PCs. In 2007 data centers accounted for about 2 TWh per year, while office and home computers accounted for 16 TWh per year. Further, 21% of PCs used at work are never switched off, contributing to wastage of about 1.5 TWh per year. Of the variety of reasons for the computers not being turned off, P2P applications such as BitTorrent play a vital role. Recent studies report that 40 to 73% of the internet traffic is P2P and BitTorent is the most popular p2p protocol. Users are always in the quest for “which bittorrent program is the best”.  Based on these statistics, the group of researchers focus on a proxy based architecture for BitTorrent.

Privacy has been a major issue with all Social Networks. While the networks do try to address the issues, most of the times – the solution provided is opting out of certain features. Researchers have tested a new privacy model, based on Bayesian Belief Networks – which creates a win-win situation for both the users and the network.

Everyday so many users join Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, MySpace etc, to keep up with friends, organize events with friends, make new friends, or flirt. One of the main features of SNSs is the”profile” where users post information about themselves. The profile can include real name, e-mail, physical address, phone number, academic classification, major, hometown, birthdates, sexual orientation, relationship status, interests, job history, favorite music/movies/books, etc. This revelation of personal information provides credibility to the profile and also helps match with other profiles. Users post personal information for a variety of reasons – 89% use it to keep up with friends, 57% use it make plans with friends, and 49% use it to make new friends. How much and what kind of information is revealed depend on users’ privacy concern and the trust on the SNS and its members.