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Interactive proofs are when humans or some theoretical questioner ask a computer questions, and they can’t trust the computer to really understand what they’re getting at. Asking multiple computers different questions makes this style of proofing more efficient. But because quantum physics is weird,
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Does it really matter which way you hang a Kandinsky? According to a study by George Mather at the University of Sussex, the answer is yes: Experiment 1 asked whether naïve observers can appreciate the correct orientation (as defined by the artist) of 40 modern artworks, some of which are entirely a
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Murder in the Dark, Mafia, Hide-and-Seek: these free-to-play games have long been part of the neglected history of street games. Ludocity is a site dedicated to real-world street and social games and houses a list of game rules and events. Some of the games on Ludocity overlap with theatre, painting
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It’s fun to play with LEGO, building things and then imagining how they fit into a world. The versitility of LEGO make them great tools for psychologists, who use them to asses spatial reasoning, as play therapy for autistic children, and to help salarymen and women think creatively. David Whitebre
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Over at Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott teaches how to play Skyrim with the under-7 crowd by sharing his experience in playing the high-fantasy game with his 4-year-old daughter Zoe. Unsurprisingly, it’s a constantly-supervised activity, but with the right guidance an open-world RPG can be a great teac
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ModDB, a site that gathers and distributes videogame mods, (also known as modifications, usually fan-made changes to a game’s code), celebrates its tenth anniversary. Back in 2002, before MySpace, right after Napster went under, was when ModDB was created to help organize the modding community. For
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We have pretty dang good graphics in our blockbuster games. But when are we going to get a game where we can have a natural conversation with a non-player character? Emily Short, who wrote the text-based dialogue game Galatea, is interested in exploring the problem of NPC dialogue. She’s helping dev
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As we get older, it gets harder to make new friends. We hold our high school and college friends closer; making a new friend seems to take lot of time and effort. We’re less willing to befriend someone completely strange to us. The NY Times has some explanations in their article: As external conditi
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There are plenty of ghosts, liches, and spectres in games set in Renaissance and Medieval times. But how did people at the time, in our world, explain things like static electricity and diabetes? Robert Burton (1577-1640), in investigating depression in his Anatomy of Melancholy, digressed into a st
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Learning a foreign language often includes making a lot of flash cards and just brutally memorizing their meanings. Well, now you can brutally memorize language vocabulary in a virtual world, with visual aids! Rob Howland’s 3D Dictionary, or SanJiten, is a game where your mission is to study virtual
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Whether you’re catching up on classics or re-living your childhood, this browser-based Game Boy Color emulator has all the most popular games available. The only downside is that you can’t save your progress or trade any pokemon.
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Videogames in exotic locations like India, Japan, and Brazil have the thrill of tourism along with their other game portions. But how do locals feel? For one Brazilian, playing Max Payne felt like a way to get revenge on his muggers. Instead of feeling like a tourist, Nightmare Mode’s Fernando Corde