暗黑破壞神 Diablo 的 Game Concept 文件

看到「Diablo - Game Concept by Condor, Inc.」這份 PDF 文件,講 1996 年年底 (12/31) 發表的 Diablo,超級經典的遊戲。

文件上可以看到這是 1994 年的紙本文件 (居然已經 22 年前了),最後面還有時程表,所以感覺起來應該是內部的紙本文件?這個經典到不行的遊戲只用了一年開發...

剛剛看英文版維基百科,最後面的連結已經加上這份資料了...

V8 JavaScript 引擎將支援 WebAssembly

V8 JavaScript 引擎宣佈支援 WebAssembly:「Experimental support for WebAssembly in V8」。

依照說明,看起來在 Google Chrome 51 之後的版本 (目前是在 Chrome Canary) 可以打開 chrome://flags#enable-webassembly 啟用 WebAssembly 測試。

目前還是只有想到電玩遊戲之類的用途...

谷李五番棋今天開打

GoogleDeepMind 所研發出來的 AlphaGo李世乭的「谷李五番棋」將在今天開打。

中國規則、兩個小時、一分鐘讀秒:

The matches will be played under Chinese rules with a komi of 7.5 (the compensation points the player who goes second receives at the end of the match). Each player will receive two hours per match with three lots of 60-second byoyomi (countdown periods after they have finished their allotted time).

將在韓國時間下午一點開賽,對我們也就是十二點開賽:

The matches will be held at the Four Seasons Hotel, Seoul, South Korea, starting at 1pm local time (4am GMT; day before 11pm ET, 8pm PT) on March 9th, 10th, 12th, 13th and 15th.

將會有大量的媒體講解直播,毫無疑問的,YouTubeDeepMind 這個頻道會有直播,目前看起來是早上的十一點半就會開始了。

其他的頻道,台灣已知的有:

不過我應該會到處看吧,中國的圍棋網站「围棋TV」也會在十一點半開始直播。

很多人都有猜測勝負,但自從去年十月贏了樊麾後,不知道成長了多少。其實都是在資訊不足的情況下猜測,在這種情況下,人類大獲全勝或是電腦大獲全勝都不意外...

也因此,五番棋的第一盤應該是最轟動的,因為可以看出 AlphaGo 長到什麼程度... 不過聽說第一盤 Google 只會拿單機版出來應戰?所以如果輸的很慘的話就會拿雲端版來戰?

啊啊啊我好想看啊...

Zynga 在舊金山的辦公室出售

Zynga 因為從全盛時期的 3500 人降到現在的 2300 人,決定賣掉在舊金山的辦公室:「Zynga puts its San Francisco headquarters up for sale」。

而且預定會賺一大筆:

Zynga acquired the space, which was once the U.S. headquarters of Sega, for $228 million. Now it maybe worth much more, given the boom in San Francisco real estate.

果然房地產才是王道 (酸) XDDD

最近電腦圍棋的兩個突破...

昨天先看到 Mark Zuckerberg 丟出來的資訊,比較完整的資料可以在「Better Computer Go Player with Neural Network and Long-term Prediction」這邊看到。

Facebook 這邊的成就在於用 DCNN-based model 改善效率,可以用一台電腦 (包括 GPU) 維持在 KGS 5d (業餘五段),跟 Zen19 差不多的棋力,跟目前最好的電腦圍棋軟體棋力差不多:

darkfmcts3now holds a stable KGS 5d level, on par with the top Go AIs, has beaten Zen19 onceand hold 1win/1lose against a Korean 6p professional player with 4 handicaps.

The distributed version, named darkfmcts3in KGS Go Server, use darkfores2 as the underlying DCNN model, runs 75,000 rollouts on 2048 threads and produces a move every 13 seconds with one Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 at 2.80GHz and 44 NVidia K40m GPUs.

In this paper, we have substantially improved the performance of DCNN-based Go AI, extensively evaluated it against both open source engines and strong amateur human players, and shown its potentials if combined with Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS).

而隔壁棚的 Google 也丟出對應的研究成果「AlphaGo: Mastering the ancient game of Go with Machine Learning」,直接往 Nature 上丟:「Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search」。

Google 不是跑在單機上,而是跑在 Google Cloud Platform 上,分散式的版本大約是職業五段的水準:

Of course, all of this requires a huge amount of compute power, so we made extensive use of Google Cloud Platform, which enables researchers working on AI and Machine Learning to access elastic compute, storage and networking capacity on demand.

實際對樊麾 (職業二段) 的成績也是五比零的大獲全勝:

So we invited the reigning 3-time European Go champion Fan Hui — an elite professional player who has devoted his life to Go since the age of 12 — to our London office for a challenge match. The match was played behind closed doors between October 5-9 last year. AlphaGo won by 5 games to 0 -- the first time a computer program has ever beaten a professional Go player.

而今年預定要去打大魔王,目前韓國圍棋第一人李世乭

AlphaGo’s next challenge will be to play the top Go player in the world over the last decade, Lee Sedol. The match will take place this March in Seoul, South Korea. Lee Sedol is excited to take on the challenge saying, "I am privileged to be the one to play, but I am confident that I can win." It should prove to be a fascinating contest!

到時候中國那邊的圍棋節目應該會有網路直播可以看吧,再來盯...

遊戲捲頁的理論與實作

文章的標題「Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers」,裡面圖又大又多,20Mbps 的光世代全速下載要跑滿一分鐘才能抓完。


順便測一下 Imgur 的 mp4,以及 HTML5 的 video tag。

裡面考了不少古啊,把捲頁的方式分成許多類別...

Minecraft 與 Bitcoin 的結合?

VentureBeat 的這篇「How Minecraft may make bitcoin the ‘official currency of virtual worlds’」讓人想了一下遊戲的虛擬貨幣與 Bitcoin 的結合...

與以往的不一樣的情況:

  • 不需要找金流系統接,Bitcoin 可以直接獨立運作,馬上可以想到不少方法利用 Bitcoin 的架構來規劃虛擬貨幣。
  • 法令更不容易管制,如果遊戲本身再透過 Tor 隱藏在 Tor network 裡的話就更完整。以往在最後要換錢的部份都還會經過金流系統與實體界接,現在連這個部分都避開了。

再來是 Bitcoin 的中立性,跨遊戲之間的交易也許是另外一個可能的強大之處?

不過 Bitcoin 的 n=6 確認應該會讓人感覺到愈來愈痛,不知道後面會怎麼解決...

Microsoft 以 25 億美金買下 Mojang


Minecraft,出自「File:Beta.png」。

如同前幾天的傳言,Microsoft 將會以 25 億美金買下 Mojang:「Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft」。

Microsoft acquired Mojang for a smooth 2.5 BILLION dollars.

不過更重要的是創辦人 Markus Persson (@notch) 選擇離開的公開信,裡面敘述了選擇賣掉並且離開的原因:「I’m leaving Mojang」。

主要的原因還是想要尋找更多有趣的事情,做更多嘗試,但 Mojang 變成沉重的負擔,所以決定讓出去...