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WoW Machinima event at Stanford tonight
I'm sitting in a nondescript conference room in a humble office building in Menlo Park, CA, a quiet Silicon Valley burg, just next to Stanford University. A polite, uniformed team of Xfire employees check on me to make sure the internet connection works. A large plasma television -- the only thing in the office that seems flashy -- plays a loop of the winners in their World of Warcraft machinima contest. The event is tonight, and I've (surprisingly) been asked to be a panelist following the screening, along with two noted machinima creators and two academics researching the field.We've been posting about the nominees occasionally, like when movies (such as Jun Falkenstein's "Ballad of the Noob") find themselves on YouTube from behind Xfire's client-required downloads. I've managed to dig up all of the nominees from Gametrailers, whose Daniel Kayser is moderating the panel, and posted the links after the break. We'll run another post after the winners are announced, just in case you aren't able to make the event.Anyone in the area -- like, say ... Stanford students -- can stop by the Peter Wallenberg Learning Theater at 6:00pm PT to watch the three hour event. As usual, I've brought a handful of Joystiq shirts, so stop by and ask for one after enjoying the festivities.
2006 DARPA Grand Challenge teams announced, prize plummets to zero dollars
If there's one event we look forward to even more than the annual Robocup competition, it's DARPA's Grand Challenge, where teams from academia and corporate America butt heads to see whose autonomous vehicle can complete a previously-unknown course in the shortest amount of time. Since the 2004 Challenge ended in utter disaster (no one even came close to finishing the entire course, and most competitors barely made it past the starting line), DARPA ran the same race in 2005 with much better results: several teams succeeded in crossing the finish line, with Stanford's VW Touareg leading the pack and taking home the two million dollar bounty. Well DARPA must have figured that it had a great source of cheap R&D at its disposal with these Challenges, so this year will see a total of two events -- one up Pike's Peak (already completed) and an urban version of the original scheduled for November 3rd. To that end, the so-called Team A participants for the Urban Challenge have just been announced (including most of the usual suspects) -- these groups will get up to $1 million in development funds before the race even begins -- while the unfunded (and therefore dark horse) Team B applicants will be revealed on October 18th. Although we doubt that most of these competitors are in it for the money, a recent Congressional ruling now prohibits DARPA from offering up cash prizes, so instead, the top three teams this year will all take home shiny new...trophies. Team B wanna-bes have up until the 13th to submit their applications, but now that you know there's no riches or funding involved, you really gotta have a love of the game to participate -- unless those trophies happen to be 24-karat gold and studded with diamonds, that is, in which case they should fetch even more on eBay than Team Buffalo's losing Yamaha ATV from 2005. [Warning: PDF link] [Via GoRobotics]
Stanford University tailors Folding@home to GPUs
Apparently the insane amount of gigaflops that your modern-day graphics card can churn out is nothing short of a phenomenon, as Folding@home's forefather Vijay Pande has tailored a new piece of software to harness to raw processing power of GPUs. Pande claimed that even the latest dual-core CPUs can't hold a candle to the floating point performance of ATi's X1900 / X1950 graphics cards. He estimated a Core 2 Duo chip could push about 25 gigaflops of folding power, while a high-end off-the-shelf ATi card could unleash a whopping 375 GFLOPS, which is about "20 to 40 times more speed" than the project has seen thus far. The team has also optimized the algorithms in the GPU-centric software, which is expected to add "10 to 15 times" more speed on top of the GPU's already impressive performance figures. Currently, the beta version is limited to the X1900 lineup, but plans are to include the X1800 variety in the near future, and Pande even mentioned that a PlayStation 3-friendly version was in the works. So if you aren't too busy tweaking your GPU-based supercomputer (or stressing over your energy bill), why not put those excessive GFLOPS to good use through Engadget's own Folding@home team, yeah?
Help cure cancer with your PS3
File this under "strange but true." In conjunction with Stanford University's Folding@home project, PlayStation 3 owners who leave their consoles connected to the internet can lend their extra horespower to running calculations and studying various proteins. So far the project has made numerous discoveries, and the long-term goals include finding cures for Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease and certain forms of cancer.For those of you who don't care about humanity's survival, every PS3 user who runs the program gets a visualization program of the folding process, complete with HDR lighting. You can check out videos via the bottom of the FAQ. Next time you're throwing a party and need some killer visuals, hook up a PS3, put on some electronica, and have yourself a life-saving rave![Via Engadget; thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
PlayStation 3 to join Folding@Home for Cure@PS3
There's no denying it, even though the PlayStation 3 may be the most late, most expensive, and most, um, well ventilated of this this generation's consoles, Sony's also going out of their way to make the device appear as versatile as possible. So hell, if your machine is going to burn energy when not in use, best to put that power suck toward a good cause, right? Stanford and Sony have announced that PlayStation 3s will be able to participate in Cure@PS3, making gamers' consoles massively parallelized computing nodes for the Folding@Home project. (You're on Engadget's Folding@Home team, right?) Right up top is a taste of the eye candy that awaits those who dedicate their Cell processor to stamping out cancer with the Stanford crew, but the veneer doesn't stop there: click on for a slew of sexy new PS3 pics that just surfaced.[Thanks, Mike! Pics via MaxConsole]
Stanford's Stickybot wall-climbing robot lizard
We thought MIT's slime-climbing robo-snail was pretty, er, slick, but we have to admit that our new fave wall-climber has got to be Stanford's Stickybot. The robot gecko has feet coated with a polymer designed to mimic the properties of setae, the tiny hairs on gecko feet that enable the lizards to climb walls. That allows the bot to clamber freely without the surface in question having to be doused with slime, as required by MIT's bot. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon is already interested in adapting the tech for military use in gloves and boots for soldiers. We can only hope this trickles down to civilian uses fast; we're so ready to connect with our inner Spidey as we climb the walls in our gecko gloves. [Via I4U]
Ejected Survivor contestant quotes Steve Jobs
While watching Survivor tonight, I noticed something interesting at the very end. The contestant who was voted off (don't worry, I won't spill the beans in case you haven't seen it yet) sort of quoted Steve Jobs during his/her exit interview. During his commencement address at Stanford University last year, Steve urged the graduates to "Stay hungry, stay foolish," and tonight's unfortunate survivor urged young people trying to make their way in the world to "be hungry, be foolish." I thought it was kind of cool.Yes, I realize that this particular quote didn't originate from Steve, but I believe it's safe to say that most geeks today associate it with him.
