Prisoner
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AI is already beating us at our own game
Although modern AI systems still have trouble deciding whether or not to flip that stranded tortoise in their path, they're already outpacing the intellectual capabilities of their creators in a wide variety of fields. From beating grandmaster Go players to outguessing cardiac surgeons, lipreading to audio transcription, neural networks and machine learning have already surpassed humans -- and that list is only going to grow longer.
Battleblock Theater lets loose a new prisoner for two weeks: Toast
Play and complete the featured solo or co-op fan-created levels in Battleblock Theater over the next two weeks and unlock another special prisoner, Toast. Mmm, crunchy. The levels can be found under the Furbottom's Features tab, where every two weeks developer The Behemoth brings out a new, unlockable prisoner for completing some user-generated stages. The Behemoth has already locked back up the Behemoth Chicken prisoner, Winston, Donuts and Furbottom, and Toast will be available for the two weeks following May 3. Check out the solo and co-op Furbottom's Features here.
The Road to Mordor: A prisoner of Isengard
With Update 5 on the horizon, there's certainly plenty to look forward to in Lord of the Rings Online, especially if you've exhausted all of Rise of Isengard's content to date. Personally, I'm still trucking along: level 73, in the middle of the Gap of Rohan, picking flowers and pontificating on Hobbit meal schedules. As you can tell, I haven't been in any particular rush to get to the end. However, I realized this past week that somewhere along the line I had abandoned my pursuit of Volume III, Book 4, so I went to pick it back up. It turned out that I was on the verge of some of the most interesting and gripping quests in the game, and for the first time since forever, I stayed up really late to see how the questing would pan out. Obviously, there's going to be some serious spoilers in this here column, so if you haven't finished Book 4 of Rise of Isengard, you may wish to just bookmark this for later reading. I'm not typically eager to spoil story points, but this quest line got me so worked up that I simply had to talk about it this week.
Chinese prisoners forced to produce virtual gold, real profits for their guards
The virtual goods economy of massively multiplayer online games may be thriving, but it's also stimulating an undesirable side-effect: exploitation. A former detainee at a prison in Heilongjiang province, China, has told the Guardian about how he was habitually forced into playing MMOs like World of Warcraft for the collection of loot, which the prison guards would then resell online for as much as ¥6,000 ($924) per day. Such totals would be the product of up to 300 inmates working 12-hour daily shifts, though predictably they saw none of the profits themselves. The unnamed source was at a "re-education through labor" camp where the usual toil would involve actual, rather than virtual, mining. The profitability of the online market has seemingly inspired prison bosses to move with the times, however, with business being so brisk that the computers "were never turned off." A Chinese government edict from 2009 is supposed to have introduced a requirement that online currencies only be traded by licensed entities, but it's believed that the practice of using prisoners in this fashion continues unabated.
Silent Hill 8 (working title) coming in 2011 from Vatra Games
Konami has just shared details on the brand new, Vatra Games-developed Silent Hill game for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 coming next year in 2011. Apparently it will have an escaped prisoner finding the town of Silent Hill, which is a little surprising. Haven't they closed the doors and locked the locks on that place yet? Every other year, it's somebody wandering in there to be chased down by evil nurses or pyramid heads, or whatever else they've come up with. The game will have a brand new composer, Dan Licht, known for his work on the television show Dexter. He's replacing Akira Yamaoka, longtime composer and sound designer, who recently left for Grasshopper Manufacture. We'll look for the game in 2011, and in the meantime, please, everybody. If the sign says Silent Hill, just turn around and head back to the interstate. Update: Press release get! The release from Konami says the game is called Silent Hill 8, but that's just a working title so far. The escaped prisoner's name is Murphy Pendleton, and he'll be part of "an all-new storyline and unique evolutions in gameplay." Sounds fun!
PlayStation tattoo gun mod gets inmate a stern rebuke, admiration from his cell block
When an inmate at Brook House Immigration Removal Centre near Gatwick, West Sussex, England, needed access to a tattoo gun (presumably banned in UK lockups, just as they are in the US) inspiration struck. According to The Sun, the inmate used the motor of a PlayStation's optical drive to move a sharpened ball-point pen. Sure, there are better ways to get ink -- such as waiting to be released -- but it ain't exactly a prison tattoo if you don't get it in prison. The paper goes on to say that from time to time a similar contraption made from "Nintendo consoles" turns up stateside, although the only such device we've ever seen was in an episode of The Wire, and it was made from an old cassette player. Either way, this is one mod we surely won't see from Ben Heck any time soon.
Dutch prisoners could get remote knee locks
The Dutch Ministry of Justice recently announced that special knee locks to prevent prisoner escapes could be tested later this year if parliament gives its approval. In the Netherlands, a "furlough" system is used to gradually reintroduce prisoners that have committed serious offenses back to society: instead of letting prisoners out when their term ends, they are accompanied by a guard to visit relatives, and gradually given more freedom until it is deemed that they are ready for unsupervised parole. Unfortunately, there have been several cases where prisoners on leave committed serious offenses like rape and murder by slipping away from their guards. The purpose of this test is to see whether a knee locking system -- which prevents a prisoner from moving if they move a certain distance away from their guard -- can prevent these kind of unfortunate cases. As draconian as this system may sound, it's probably the most humane of all the solutions that were looked at: prisoners could potentially have had to wear gadgets that gave them electric shocks or injected drugs to prevent them from escaping. The best part about this whole case is what justice ministry spokesman Wim van der Weegen compared the system to: illegally parked cars. Probably not the best analogy he could have used -- badly parked car = potentially inconvenient. Escaped prisoner = potentially capable of murder -- but we'll give Wim the benefit of the doubt this time, and mark it up as lost in translation.[Thanks, Joel]
