122,626 research outputs found
Parallelized Rigid Body Dynamics
Physics engines are collections of API-like software designed for video games, movies and scientific simulations. While physics engines often come in many shapes and designs, all engines can benefit from an increase in speed via parallelization. However, despite this need for increased speed, it is uncommon to encounter a parallelized physics engine today. Many engines are long-standing projects and changing them to support parallelization is too costly to consider as a practical matter. Parallelization needs to be considered from the design stages through completion to ensure adequate implementation. In this project we develop a realistic approach to simulate physics in a parallel environment. Utilizing many techniques we establish a practical approach to significantly reduce the run-time on a standard physics engine
Game Engine Conventions and Games that Challenge them: Subverting Conventions as Metacommentary
Consumer-grade game engines such as Multimedia Fusion and RPG Maker have dramatically extended the reach of digital games as a medium. They have also spawned online communities, where conventions and canons of using these tools have evolved. These partly stem from the functional constraints of the game engines themselves and are institutionalized through manuals, examples, tutorials, and games made with them. However, some members of game engine communities actively seek to challenge these conventions by experimenting with the engines and finding ingenious ways to put them to unexpected uses. Such experiments can be regarded as a form of metacommentary on the engines’ capabilities and limitations. While arguably impractical and inefficient, they enrich the scope of what can be done with the engine and can contribute to its further development
On the Impact of Information Technologies on Society: an Historical Perspective through the Game of Chess
The game of chess as always been viewed as an iconic representation of
intellectual prowess. Since the very beginning of computer science, the
challenge of being able to program a computer capable of playing chess and
beating humans has been alive and used both as a mark to measure
hardware/software progresses and as an ongoing programming challenge leading to
numerous discoveries. In the early days of computer science it was a topic for
specialists. But as computers were democratized, and the strength of chess
engines began to increase, chess players started to appropriate to themselves
these new tools. We show how these interactions between the world of chess and
information technologies have been herald of broader social impacts of
information technologies. The game of chess, and more broadly the world of
chess (chess players, literature, computer softwares and websites dedicated to
chess, etc.), turns out to be a surprisingly and particularly sharp indicator
of the changes induced in our everyday life by the information technologies.
Moreover, in the same way that chess is a modelization of war that captures the
raw features of strategic thinking, chess world can be seen as small society
making the study of the information technologies impact easier to analyze and
to grasp
User Satisfaction in Competitive Sponsored Search
We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study
the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers
compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to
display in response to user queries. Customers, in turn, have private
preferences over search results and will tend to use search engines that are
more likely to display pages satisfying their demands.
Our main question is whether competition between search engines increases the
overall welfare of the users (i.e., the likelihood that a user finds a page of
interest). When search engines derive utility only from customers to whom they
show relevant results, we show that they differentiate their results, and every
equilibrium of the resulting game achieves at least half of the welfare that
could be obtained by a social planner. This bound also applies whenever the
likelihood of selecting a given engine is a convex function of the probability
that a user's demand will be satisfied, which includes natural Markovian models
of user behavior.
On the other hand, when search engines derive utility from all customers
(independent of search result relevance) and the customer demand functions are
not convex, there are instances in which the (unique) equilibrium involves no
differentiation between engines and a high degree of randomness in search
results. This can degrade social welfare by a factor of the square root of N
relative to the social optimum, where N is the number of webpages. These bad
equilibria persist even when search engines can extract only small (but
non-zero) expected revenue from dissatisfied users, and much higher revenue
from satisfied ones
Invisible Engines
Harnessing the power of software platforms: what executives and entrepreneurs must know about how to use this technology to transform industries and how to develop the strategies that will create value and drive profits. Software platforms are the invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century. They power everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to search engines and web portals. They have been the source of enormous value to consumers and helped some entrepreneurs build great fortunes. And they are likely to drive change that will dwarf the business and technology revolution we have seen to this point. Invisible Engines examines the business dynamics and strategies used by firms that recognize the transformative power unleashed by this new revolution—a revolution that will change both new and old industries. The authors argue that in order to understand the successes of software platforms, we must first understand their role as a technological meeting ground where application developers and end users converge. Apple, Microsoft, and Google, for example, charge developers little or nothing for using their platforms and make most of their money from end users; Sony PlayStation and other game consoles, by contrast, subsidize users and make more money from developers, who pay royalties for access to the code they need to write games. More applications attract more users, and more users attract more applications. And more applications and more users lead to more profits. Invisible Engines explores this story through the lens of the companies that have mastered this platform-balancing act. It offers detailed studies of the personal computer, video game console, personal digital assistant, smart mobile phone, and digital media software platform industries, focusing on the business decisions made by industry players to drive profits and stay a step ahead of the competition. Shorter discussions of Internet-based software platforms provide an important glimpse into a future in which the way we buy, pay, watch, listen, learn, and communicate will change forever. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license
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