university of california irvine
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Wind and solar could meet 85 percent of current US electricity needs
Renewable sources may meet most power demands in 'advanced, industrialized nations,' according to a study.
AI learns to solve a Rubik's Cube in 1.2 seconds
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have created an artificial intelligence system that can solve a Rubik's Cube in an average of 1.2 seconds in about 20 moves. That's two seconds faster than the current human world record of 3.47 seconds, while people who can finish the puzzle quickly usually do so in about 50.
OutRun AR project lets you game and drive at the same time, makes us drool
Cool game, or coolest game ever? That's the question we were asking ourselves when we first came across Garnet Hertz's augmented reality-based OutRun project -- a concept car that weds Sega's classic driving game with an electric golf cart, allowing players to navigate their way around real-life courses using only arcade consoles. Hertz, an informatics researcher at the University of California Irvine, has since brought his idea to fruition, after outfitting the system with cameras and customized software that can "look" in front of the car to automatically reproduce the route on the game cabin's screen. The map is displayed in the same 8-bit rendering you'd see on the original OutRun, with perspectives changing proportionally to shifts in steering. The cart maxes out at only 13 mph, though speed isn't really the idea; Hertz and his colleagues hope their technology can be used to develop game-based therapies for disabled users, or to create similarly AR-based wheelchairs. Scoot past the break to see a video of the car in action, and let your dreams converge. [Thanks, Stagueve]
Researchers study WoW to see how gangs form and fade
We've seen WoW used for a lot of research, from epidemics to anthropological fieldwork, but this is probably one of the craziest and one of the most helpful (assuming it works) ways to use it. Psychologists at the University of Miami and the University of California, Irvine have been studying how guilds and groups form in World of Warcraft in the hopes that it'll help them figure out how gangs form in real life. It sounds like a wild idea, but following guilds and groups in World of Warcraft is much easier than trying to study spontaneous guilds in the real world, because you've got immediate access to data: when people joined and left and why. And the psychologists say putting data together like this will help, because it'll help answer questions about, for example, what happens when you decide to separate a group of people -- do they form their own groups again or do they stay separated?They say there are other connections as well: though killing dragons is far less heinous than killing innocent bystanders, Warcraft guilds form, grow, stick together, and fall apart just like gangs and even other groups all over the world do. No matter what kind of group it is, the researchers say that "group ecology" is the same everywhere, so studying the way we work in endgame raids can lead to ideas about what we're doing elsewhere. Very interesting.Unfortunately, they're full on potential but still pretty short on conclusions yet (listen, guys, all you have to do to break up gangs is ensure there's not enough loot to go around), but once again, Azeroth seems like a fertile ground for directly studying just how we players interact as humans.
Second Life helps model real life transit system
A University of California, Irvine computer scientist named Crista Lopes has been using Second Life to work on her rapid transit project called SkyTran. Apparently, SL's physics are close enough to real life that a workable simulation of the system can be built initially, with tweaks to the controlling software to be made upon export from SL.There's more to the article beyond what I've summarized here, and you can see a video interview with Ms. Lopes here. This would be reporter Colin Stewart's first visit to SL, apparently, judging by his newbie avatar looks; or perhaps he just doesn't care to spend the time customizing. There's a cute bit where he says 'ouch' as he hops into one of SkyTran's cars and gets pushed through a bush. I love seeing things like this, but I hope Ms. Lopes remembers to adjust for the absence of lag. [Thanks, Colin!]
