Design, engineering and utility of biotic games

Games are a significant and defining part of human culture, and their utility beyond pure entertainment has been demonstrated with so-called ‘serious games’. Biotechnology – despite its recent advancements – has had no impact on gaming yet. Here we propose the concept of ‘biotic games’, i.e., games that operate on biological processes. Utilizing a variety of biological processes we designed and tested a collection of games: ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Ciliaball’, ‘PAC-mecium’, ‘Microbash’, ‘Biotic Pinball’, ‘POND PONG’, ‘PolymerRace’, and ‘The Prisoner's Smellemma’. We found that biotic games exhibit unique features compared to existing game modalities, such as utilizing biological noise, providing a real-life experience rather than virtual reality, and integrating the chemical senses into play. Analogous to video games, biotic games could have significant conceptual and cost-reducing effects on biotechnology and eventually healthcare; enable volunteers to participate in crowd-sourcing to support medical research; and educate society at large to support personal medical decisions and the public discourse on bio-related issues

From Biological to Synthetic Neurorobotics Approaches to Understanding the Structure Essential to Consciousness (Part 3)

This third paper locates the synthetic neurorobotics research reviewed in the second paper in terms of themes introduced in the first paper. It begins with biological non-reductionism as understood by Searle. It emphasizes the role of synthetic neurorobotics studies in accessing the dynamic structure essential to consciousness with a focus on system criticality and self, develops a distinction between simulated and formal consciousness based on this emphasis, reviews Tani and colleagues' work in light of this distinction, and ends by forecasting the increasing importance of synthetic neurorobotics studies for cognitive science and philosophy of mind going forward, finally in regards to most- and myth-consciousness

Program for Teaching Electronics to Middle School Students

This project involved the creation of an educational program for teaching electronics to middle school students, as well as conducting a pilot course at the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop in Hamden, CT. Hands-on activities were developed, along with take-home kits, student notebooks, an instructor\u27s guide and video, for ease of implementation. The program proved successful and will be offered on a regular basis. Future electronics summer camps are planned, and the museum has advertized the course on its website

Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

Q-learning and Deep Q-learning in OpenAI Gym CartPole classic control environment

Abstract. This thesis focuses on the basics of reinforcement learning and the implementation of Deep Q-learning, also referred to as Deep Q-network, to emphasize the artificial neural network, and Q-learning to the CartPole-v0 classic control learning environment. This work also presents the idea of a Markov Decision process, standard algorithms, and some basic information about the OpenAI Gym toolkit. DQN is a deep learning version of regular Q-learning, the crucial difference being the use of a neural network and experience replay. Cartpole-v0 can be considered an easy learning problem, especially for DQN, since the number of states and specific actions is relatively low. The learning results between Q-learning and DQN were examined by comparing the convergence and stability of rewards, the cumulative reward gain, and how quickly the Cartpole-v0 learning environment was solved. While it is tough to determine which implementation solved the CartPole-v0 problem better, it can be concluded that while DQN is often seen as the more advanced and complicated version of regular Q-learning, it did not perform better than Q-learning.Q-oppiminen ja Syvä Q-oppiminen OpenAI Gym CartPole-säätöympäristössä. Tiivistelmä. Tämä työ keskittyy esittelemään vahvistusoppimisen perusteita, sekä vertailemaan oppimista Q-oppimisen ja syvän Q-oppimisen välillä CartPole-v0 säätöympäristössä. Työ käsittelee myös Markovin päätöksentekoprosessia ja niissä käytettäviä algoritmeja. Tärkein ero syvän Q-oppimisen ja Q-oppimisen välillä on se, että syvä Q-oppiminen käyttää neuroverkkoa ja muistista oppimista tavallisen Q-oppimisessa käytetyn Q-taulukon sijaan. CartPole-v0 oppimisympäristöä voidaan pitää helppona oppimisympäristönä erityisesti syvä Q-oppimiselle, sillä CartPole-oppimisympäristössä mahdollisten tilojen määrä on verrattain pieni. Oppimista implementaatioiden välillä vertailtiin tarkastelemalla palkintojen suppenemista ja vakautta, palkintojen kumulatiivista arvoa ja oppimisympäristön ratkaisunopeutta. Syvää Q-oppimista pidetään tavallisen Q-oppimisen monimutkaisempana muotona, ja se pärjääkin yleensä paremmin monimutkaisemmissa ympäristöissä, joissa tilojen määrä kasvaa erittäin suureksi. Etukäteen on mahdotonta sanoa, kumpi implementaatio oppii kohdeympäristön tehokkaammin. Syvä Q-oppiminen oppii vaikeita ympäristöjä paljon tehokkaammin kuin tavallinen Q-oppiminen, kun taas Q-oppiminen oppii vähätilaisia ympäristöjä tehokkaammin, koska sen ei tarvitse käyttää muistista oppimista, joka hidastaa harjoitusprosessia

Very Important Game People in the History of Computer and Video Games

This thesis covers the history of 30 very important game people (in alphabetical order): David Arneson, Ralph Baer, Daniel Bunten, Nolan Bushnell, John Carmack, Chris Crawford, Richard Garriott, Gary Gygax, Trip Hawkins, Rob Hubbard, Toru Iwatani, Eugene Jarvis, Ken Kutaragi, Ed Logg, Sid Meier, Jeff Minter, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, Yuji Naka, Alexey Pajitnov, John Romero, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Chris Stamper, Tim Stamper, Yu Suzuki, Satoshi Tajiri, Ken Williams, Roberta Williams, Will Wright and Gunpei Yokoi. It includes their background, their most important games and game-related work. It also provides information about the companies they worked for and the people they worked with. The thesis was created by gathering information from large number of sources, including books, internet, magazines, games and contacting some of the actual people. The thesis also contains a timeline of the most important events in the history of computer and video games and a chapter on the precursors of videogames, namely money game machines and pinball. The thesis is illustrated with several hundred pictures

Greatness STEMS From Iowans Governor's STEM Advisory Council: 2013/2014 Fiscal Year in Review, 2014

On the Iowa Assessments, students who participated in the STEM Scale-Up Program scored higher than students statewide this report evaluations