GITS Laughing Man in Real Life

The real lesson of the GITS Laughing Man for the digital age is not about myth or becoming a folk hero. Anti-corpo is just the surface level It is about copycats and the viral spread of memes. Not all memes succeed in going viral. But Once everyone (even foreign adversaries manufacturing outrage) amplifies a meme, it takes on a life of its own, to become a powerful force to shape opinion and distort truth. Agents spam memetic messaging to gain acceptance and followers, not to spread truth. ...

 How Computational Review of Chess Games Revealed Narrativ...

Paradoxically, when other top players wrote about games in magazines and newspaper columns they often made more mistakes in their commentary than the players had made at the board. Even when the players themselves published analyses of their own games they were often less accurate than when they were playing the game. Strong moves were called errors, weak moves were praised. It was not only a few cases of journalists who were lousy players failing to comprehend the genius of the champions, or...

 Null Move

Called the "null move" technique, it tells the engine to "pass" for one side. That is, to evaluate a position as if one player could make two moves in a row. If the position has not improved even after moving twice, then it can be assumed that the first move is a dud and can be quickly discarded from the search tree, reducing its size and making the search more efficient. Null moves were used in some of the earliest chess programs, including the Soviet Kaissa. It's elegant and a little ironic...

 Gamification Stock Holding Mechanic

Mrs. Lazarus has some experience with games such as this and decides to construct a blank environment (a planet without biomes) with a 10 × 10 grid, thereby creating a board with 100 squares. Before play, each student is given three different animals or plants (one with a broad tolerance for several different habitats, one that is a bit more particular, and one that is very fussy indeed). The players then use their numbered tiles and shares to shape and manipulate this blank environment to t...

 Russian Transhumanism

Russia has always been considered a hotbed of utopias, both from above and from below, that is: State and intelligentsia (think of Peter the Great, Nikolai Chernyshevskii‘s socialist-utopian novel "What‘s to be Done" or Dostoevskii‘s ideal man Count Myshkin, the Idiot) – and at the same time there was a strong milleniarism among the people, a religious zeal leading to a variety of sects, peasant and folk beliefs resulting sometimes in bizarre mass movements. (Skoptsy) (This history h...