something to aim at in Japan

Most men at one time or another (hopefully when they were merely boys) have enjoyed a spot or two of “sword fighting” in school toilets – just to clear up any misconceptions members of the fairer sex may have about such activities, this involves the clashing of streams, not appendages. One of the unfortunate side effects of these duels can be fair degree of spray ending up where it isn’t supposed to, creating extra work for those whose job it is to keep such facilities clean. Now Sega is bringing restroom gaming into the 21st century with a video game that makes use of a pressure sensor built into the urinal to entice urinators to keep their pee on target.

The “Toylet” – its actual name – consists of a sensor in the bowl of the urinal that measures both the strength, length and location of the urine stream, and an LCD display located at head height. The four games on offer include “Milk from Nose”, which pits the player against the previous user in a competition for the strongest flow, “The North Wind and Her”, in which the user plays as the wind to lift up a woman’s skirt, “Graffiti Eraser” that sees the player try and clear a wall of graffiti on a wall with some high-pressure blasting and “Mannequin Pis” which tells you how much urine you’ve discharged. Players proud of the urinary achievements can even download their scores onto a flash drive.

While the comfort station consoles are designed to improve the aim of public toilet users by providing an incentive to stay on target, they could also provide Sega with an extra revenue “stream” through the displaying of advertisements on the console’s screen before the games.

Sega has installed the Toylets in four metro stations in – you guessed it – Tokyo, where they will be trialed until the end of January.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Could virtual sex be the Kinect’s killer app? (NSFW)

Once open source drivers for Microsoft’s Kinect were created, it was inevitable the device would be put to use in a virtual sex game. With it around a month since such drivers started appearing, ThriXXX, a company responsible for a range of 3D sex games that are already compatible with a number of sex toy peripherals, has now produced a video demo of a Kinect being used to virtually fondle a number of computer generated ladies. Read More

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

‘Chess Terminator’ robot takes on former champ Kramnik in blitz match

For almost as long as we’ve had computers, humans have been trying to make ones that play chess. The most famous chess-playing computer of course is IBM’s Deep Blue, which in 1997 defeated the then World Champion Garry Kasparov. But as powerful as Deep Blue was, it didn’t actually move the chess pieces on its own. Perhaps that’s a trivial task in comparison to beating the best chess player of all-time, but still I was pleased to discover this recent video of a chess robot that more closely fits the true definition of a chess automaton. Read More

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

PALO ALTO, Calif. (UPI) — U.S. mathematicians say they’ve solved the riddle of the minimum number of moves it takes to solve the Rubik’s Cube puzzle, a figure they call “God’s number.”

A team from Palo Alto, Calif., says every possible scrambled arrangement of the puzzle can be solved in no more than 20 moves, NewScientist.com reported Wednesday.

They combined computing power with mathematical insights to check all 43 quintillion possible jumbled positions the cube can take, says Tomas Rokicki, a programmer who has spent 15 years looking for the least number of moves guaranteed to solve any configuration of the Rubik’s cube.

“The primary breakthrough was figuring out a way to solve so many positions, all at once, at such a fast rate,” Rokicki says.

Previous computer methods solved around 4,000 possible cubes a second by attempting a set of starting moves, then determining if the resulting position was closer to the solution. If not, the computer would throw out those moves and start again.

Rokicki’s key insight was to realize these dead-end moves are actually solutions to a different starting position, which led him to a computer algorithm that could try out 1 billion cubes per second.

The team has dubbed the 20-moves solution “God’s number,” the assumption being that even the Almighty couldn’t solve the puzzle faster, NewScientist said.

Copyright 2010 by United Press International

Sourced & published by Henry sapiecha

ALBUQUERQUE (UPI) — U.S. and Canadian scientists say the brains of adolescent girls who play the computer game Tetris appear to have greater thickness and efficiency.

Researchers from the Mind Research Network, a non-profit organization in Albuquerque, and the Montreal Neurological Institute performed both structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of the brains of girls who practiced the computer game Tetris for three months, and of girls who did not play the game.

The scientists said the structural MRI measured the thickness of areas of the brain, and the functional MRI measured the efficiency of brain activity.

“We were excited to see cortical thickness differences between the girls that practiced Tetris and those that did not,” said Dr. Richard Haier, one of the study’s authors.

But he expressed surprise “that these changes were not where we saw more efficiency.”

Haier said girls who played Tetris had thicker brain tissue in the left frontal and temporal areas that are believed to control complex movements and the coordination of sensory data. However, the brain areas of the girls who practiced Tetris showed greater efficiency in the right frontal and parietal lobes that are associated with critical reasoning and language use.

The research, published in the online journal BMC Research Notes, was funded by an agent for the Tetris Company that also employs Haier as a consultant.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 8th Sept 2009