Indie insurgency fails to topple old guard at gaming BAFTAs

Destiny: big budget, but what about the gameplay? Ferino Design / Bungie, CC BY

The BAFTA Games Awards showed a promising future for independent developers, as they went toe-to-toe against multi-million dollar behemoths at the little brother of the academy’s established and prestigious film awards. Judging by the results, though, it’ll be years until the efforts of small studios in the games industry are acknowledged as anything but exceptions to the continued rule of the big publishers.

There were undoubtedly some notable successes for the independent games scene. The most surprising victory was innovative two dimensional skateboarding game OlliOlli, which bested annual instalments of FIFA and Football Manager in the Sports Game category. The M C Escher-inspired puzzler Monument Valley picked up prizes for Best Mobile and Best British Game. The beautiful paper craft visuals of Lumino City got a deserving nod for Artistic Achievement, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter won for Game Innovation, likely because of its unique use of realistic photo-scan technology for its visuals.

Fun in just two dimensions.

Annual awards bring annual success

While these are impressive wins, much of the night was inevitably spent noting the work of traditional studio-publisher models, including the praiseworthy likes of Shadow of Mordor, Titanfall, and Hearthstone.

A good deal of respect was paid to the inevitable franchise instalments of the past year, too. This was particularly clear in the nominee list for some categories – puzzle darling Threes was the only indie in the running for Game Design. Monument Valley stood alone for Best Game. The Multiplayer, Audio, Music, Family and Performer categories showed no nominations for independent studios at all.

Part of the challenge for indie studios to get nominations and wins is how BAFTA categorises its awards. This is a change from the film awards, which mark out clear categories for technical skills such as Cinematography, Set Design, and so on. This means that despite (or perhaps because of) how games are made, Assassin’s Creed Unity, a rushed release plagued by bugs which made the game at times look laughably bad, was nominated in the Artistic Achievement category when smaller, less technically impressive works failed to make the list.

Even in areas where indies triumphed, the strangeness of how BAFTA arranges its nominees meant shortlists sometimes seemed incomparable. When The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was given the victory for Game Innovation, it was against titles that showed creativity in completely different ways. How can Shadow of Mordor’s brilliant nemesis system, which generates semi-random foes unique to each player, be meaningfully compared with Ethan Carter’s new way of creating game visuals in terms of innovation? The two are as different as apples and orcs. Categories which separated technical and artistic achievement would avoid much of this problem.

Shadow of Mordor creates ‘nemeses’ unique to each playthrough. Monolith / Bago, CC BY

In another example of the oddity of categories, survival horror game The Last of Us won two awards this year that it won last year as well –Best Performer and Best Story – because it released a downloadable prequel called Left Behind early in 2014. As good as The Last of Us was, it’s hard not to feel that a separate category for downloadable content might have been a good idea. On a different release schedule, Left Behind would have been covered by last year’s victories.

Destined to win

The most stand-out result of the night was undoubtedly Destiny, if only for dubious reasons. The first-person shooter by the makers of Halo won Best Game despite failing to take home Best Multiplayer, Best Persistent Game or Best Game Design – all qualities on which its success as an online, multiplayer based shooter should hang. The game, which received a muted critical reception, is reminiscent of the oft-stated adage that Best Picture awards tend not to go to the best film but the least controversial one.

Worse still, aside from the breakout Monument Valley, the other nominees for Best Game were all marquee releases for major publishers, including licensed monsters Shadow of Mordor and Alien: Isolation. Also featured were franchise instalments Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mario Kart 8, the latest in a series which began in 1992.

Of course, awards in any artistic medium are a matter of opinion. A majority of BAFTA’s voters and jurists may genuinely feel that Destiny was the finest game 2014 had to offer. The results seem to suggest that most indie titles can only compete with the big-budget monsters in one or perhaps two narrow areas, leaving bigger games to claim most of the biggest awards by sheer force of wallet size.

It seems the still-fledgling ceremony needs to develop its structure to better fit the industry before it can truly stand alone. There’s nothing wrong with giving prizes to inoffensive instalments of well-loved, long running series, but at the same time we should think carefully about how we compare the qualities that games possess so that some can win a small gold award.

Nanocrystals explain chameleons’ color shifts

Dazzling chameleons flash different hues by stretching and flexing reflective nanocrystals in their skin.

Michel C. Milinkovitch/www.lanevol.org

Scientists have discovered the secret behind chameleons’ fabulous color-changing ways: nanobling.

Tiny, adjustable crystals embedded in chameleons’ skin reflect specific wavelengths of light based on their position, scientists report March 10 in Nature Communications . By simply stretching or contracting their glittery skin, the lizards can change color and regulate their body temperature.

The wee crystals are made of guanine, a component of DNA, and show up in two layers, researchers found. The top layer reflects visible light, switching from reflecting short wavelengths (such as blues) when relaxed to longer wavelengths (such as reds) when stretched. The bottom layer of crystals reflects lizard-warming infrared wavelengths.

Look, your eyes are wired backwards: here's why

The retina captures light signals and sends them to the brain. from www.shutterstock.com

The human eye is optimised to have good colour vision at day and high sensitivity at night. But until recently it seemed as if the cells in the retina were wired the wrong way round, with light travelling through a mass of neurons before it reaches the light-detecting rod and cone cells. New research presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society has uncovered a remarkable vision-enhancing function for this puzzling structure.

Section through the retina and its layers. Labin/Safuri/Perlman/Ribak/Nature

About a century ago, the fine structure of the retina was discovered. The retina is the light-sensitive part of the eye, lining the inside of the eyeball. The back of the retina contains cones to sense the colours red, green and blue. Spread among the cones are rods, which are much more light-sensitive than cones, but which are colour-blind.

Before arriving at the cones and rods, light must traverse the full thickness of the retina, with its layers of neurons and cell nuclei. These neurons process the image information and transmit it to the brain, but until recently it has not been clear why these cells lie in front of the cones and rods, not behind them. This is a long-standing puzzle, even more so since the same structure, of neurons before light detectors, exists in all vertebrates, showing evolutionary stability.

Researchers in Leipzig found that glial cells, which also span the retinal depth and connect to the cones, have an interesting attribute. These cells are essential for metabolism, but they are also denser than other cells in the retina. In the transparent retina, this higher density (and corresponding refractive index) means that glial cells can guide light, just like fibre-optic cables.

Selective vision

In view of this, my colleague Amichai Labin and I built a model of the retina, and showed that the directional of glial cells helps increase the clarity of human vision. But we also noticed something rather curious: the colours that best passed through the glial cells were green to red, which the eye needs most for daytime vision. The eye usually receives too much blue – and thus has fewer blue-sensitive cones.

Further computer simulations showed that green and red are concentrated five to ten times more by the glial cells, and into their respective cones, than blue light. Instead, excess blue light gets scattered to the surrounding rods.

This surprising result of the simulation now needed an experimental proof. With colleagues at the Technion Medical School, we tested how light crosses guinea pig retinas. Like humans, these animals are active during the day and their retinal structure has been well-characterised, which allowed us to simulate their eyes just as we had done for humans. Then we passed light through their retinas and, at the same time, scanned them with a microscope in three dimensions. This we did for 27 colours in the visible spectrum.

Beady-eyed guinea pigs make great…well… guinea pigs, for optical research Jg4817, CC BY-SA

The result was easy to notice: in each layer of the retina we saw that the light was not scattered evenly, but concentrated in a few spots. These spots were continued from layer to layer, thus creating elongated columns of light leading from the entrance of the retina down to the cones at the detection layer. Light was concentrated in these columns up to ten times, compared to the average intensity.

Even more interesting was the fact that the colours that were best guided by the glial cells matched nicely with the colours of the cones. The cones are not as sensitive as the rods, so this additional light allowed them to function better – even under lower light levels. Meanwhile, the bluer light, that was not well-captured in the glial cells, was scattered onto the rods in its vicinity.

These results mean that the retina of the eye has been optimised so that the sizes and densities of glial cells match the colours to which the eye is sensitive (which is in itself an optimisation process suited to our needs). This optimisation is such that colour vision during the day is enhanced, while night-time vision suffers very little. The effect also works best when the pupils are contracted at high illumination, further adding to the clarity of our colour vision.

A day in the life of Pi

Maths is everywhere and Pi is no exception Holger Motzkau, CC BY-SA

Most people have heard of the mathematical constant Pi (π), and will know that it’s roughly 3.14. Taking inspiration from these three digits, March 14 (3/14 in the US date format) is heralded as international Pi Day, first marked by US physicist Larry Shaw in 1988.

This year brings a unique opportunity to demonstrate an entirely unnecessary degree of zeal by marking Pi Day correct to nine decimal places on March 14, 2015, at 9.26am 53sec – corresponding to 3.141592653, the first 10 digits of Pi. If you’re too busy this weekend, you could book in July 22 – another way of expressing Pi approximately is the fraction 22/7.

Pi Pie at Delft University

Pi is calculated as the ratio between a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

Pi is always the same value, no matter the size of the circle, which makes it an important mathematical constant.

The ancient Babylonians calculated Pi as three by taking three times the square of the circle’s radius, later refining the value to 3.125. Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 BCE) approximated Pi by inscribing polygons on the inside and outside of a circle. By increasing the number of sides of the polygons, Pi could be calculated to higher levels of accuracy.

Even today, calculating Pi to ever increasing levels of accuracy continues – it has now been found to an accuracy of over 13 trillion digits. There’s no reason to suspect this record will remain forever, even though only about 39 decimal places are sufficient for astronomical precision. There is no reason to be more precise for practical purposes but it is good scientific sport of sorts to strive to be ever more accurate.

Ever decreasing Pi. German

Some Properties of Pi

Pi is an irrational number, which means it cannot be accurately represented as a fraction, a/b, where a and b are integers. An approximation is to express it as 22/7 (3.1428…) which is inaccurate by 0.04025%. A closer approximation is 104348/33215, which has a far smaller error of 0.00000001056% but is still, technically, wrong.

Pi is also a transcendental number which, simplified, are numbers that cannot be reduced algebraically (more accurately a number that is not the root of any non-zero polynomial equation with rational coefficients).

The proof that Pi is transcendental was found in 1882, but it had been known for much longer that if Pi was transcendental then it would be impossible to square the circle – to construct a square with the same area as a circle.

Numberphile: Squaring the Circle

Putting Pi to use

Among the unusual uses for Pi is its relation to the nature of meandering rivers. A river’s path is described by its sinuosity, it’s tendency to wind from side to side as it traverses a plain. This is described mathematically as the length of its winding path divided by the length of the river as the crow flies. The average river has a sinuosity of about 3.14.

Albert Einstein actually made some observations about why rivers meandered as they did. He noticed that the water that flows faster around the outside of a bend, eroding that bank more quickly. This creates a larger bend. These bends eventually meet and the river forms a short cut through them. Hans-Henrik Stolum used these observations and noted a relationship with chaos theory, which suggests that, despite rivers straightening out as the rivers cut through the short cuts, the sinuosity tends to move back towards Pi.

Numberphile: Pi and Sinuosity

Further examples of where Pi appears in the real world can be seen in a BBC item written for Pi Day 2008, and this New Scientist item written for the 2010 Pi Day. For example, Pi can be found in the measurements of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the angular distances of stars in the sky and in a song by Kate Bush. Included in the lyrics were the first hundred digits, or so, of Pi, but she went slightly wrong at around digit 50.

Pi by Kate Bush

How to celebrate Pi day?

If you fancy some Pi-related entertainment for Saturday, you could try:

• Looking up whether your birth date appears in the decimal places of Pi – mine does, starting at 200,703, although if you want to know my age you’ll have to look it up.

Birthday Boy Oren Jack Turner

• 
  

  Memorising the first digits of Pi. Piphilology, a system of mnemonics to help you remember the digits, may help. There are even piems (Pi poems) to help you remember. You may not beat the record-holder, which currently stands at 67,000 places.

  
  


• 
  

  Examining the first million digits of Pi – you might see a pattern no one else has.

  
  


• 
  

  Looking for Pi in everyday life. For example, it has featured in Mythbusters.

  
  


• 
  

  Follow #piday2015 on Twitter, and see how others have marked the day in the past.

  
  

… and finally

Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientists the world has known, spent some time working on Pi as it related to rivers. Is it a coincidence that Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879? As he would have said himself, God doesn’t play dice.

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For more slices of Pi, try a taste here or here.

Upgraded LHC pushes physics into the unknown

Look into my high-energy particle physics and what do you see? CERN

There’s a certain degree of anticipation and anxiety among scientists at CERN and beyond as the Large Hadron Collider prepares to roar back into life after a two-year break.

Upgraded with more powerful magnets to smash particles together with almost twice its previous energy, this will bring with it the opportunity to discover new, even more massive particles – just as with the Higgs boson – that will signpost the way beyond our current understanding of particle physics, the Standard Model. Why do we think this? Because Einstein’s equation of energy-mass equivalence – more familiar to people as E=mc² – tells us that in order to make more massive particles we need more energy – even more than the LHC has been capable of delivering so far.

Listen harder, hear more

But energy is only part of the story; what’s also needed is greater precision, more sensitive detectors that allow for more nuanced data, which reveals rare events or subtle effects not previously observed. To this end, the detectors have been upgraded too.

ATLAS, one of the four main experiments built around the 27km of the LHC complex, has gained the capacity to measure the paths of the charged particles produced in the collisions. This has improved the accuracy with which we can measure the lifetimes of these ephemeral particles that in some cases exist only for a tiny fraction of time.

Filter more noise

The experiments have also increased the rate and selectivity with which they record collisions in the LHC. As a great deal of subatomic particle physics is already known, the more unusual, exciting events are hidden within a huge torrent of data representing more mundane particle interactions. The sheer volume of raw data – about a petabyte, or around 210,000 DVDs per second – from the experiments requires algorithms to rapidly filter and select the new and unusual events for further study while discarding the rest.

Particle collissions in the LHC have taken us to the edge of physics. CERN

Better selectivity is not the end of the problem, however. To cope with the volume of data produced by the experiments due to the more energetic collisions and more sensitive detectors means new software and storage procedures must be written. These will also transmit the data across the worldwide distributed computing system, which allows not just an accurate reconstruction of each collision from the traces recorded in the detectors, but also more rapid access for scientists to the records.

Unanswered questions

It’s a lot of hard work under tight budget constraints, but the effort is worth it. There are many open questions that the Standard Model simply cannot answer.

Is the recently discovered Higgs boson the particle the Standard Model predicts, or is it the first of a family of undiscovered, even more rare Higgs particles that are predicted by more complete but speculative theories such as Supersymmetry? What is the nature of the dark matter that astronomy tells us is far more abundant than the ordinary matter we’ve come to understand so well? How did a Big Bang that produced a balance of matter and antimatter result in the world of matter that we know today?

The Standard Model of quarks and other particles, including the Higgs boson. MissMJ, CC BY

My own principle interest in these questions is being addressed through studying the decays of particles containing quarks, the fundamental particles found inside the protons and neutrons that constitute an atomic nucleus. Of the six types of quarks it is the bottom quark (also known as the beauty quark) that is particularly interesting as the way it decays displays a small bias for matter over antimatter, but not enough so far to explain the world we know.

However, through an odd but well understood quirk of quantum mechanics, new and massive particles even bigger than we can produce in the LHC can affect these particles' decays and leave a trail to the new physics we need to develop to better explain the universe. Some of these studies are already underway at dedicated experiments like LHCb, which has already proved several hypothesied supermassive particles, but for others general purpose experiments like ATLAS can be better.

Unlike the first season of experiments with the LHC, once the first proton beam fires up on March 23 we will not have such a clear roadmap of what to expect, or what to aim for. The first run was led by the knowledge that we would either find the Higgs and add to the Standard Model, or not find it and break the Standard Model in an act of creative destruction pushing us on to find better theories.

This time, there is a clear programme of work around the Standard Model, including the Higgs, but we have many guides that point towards new physics. Most analyses will advance science through excluding possibilities, but the new discoveries will be all the more enlightening. In a sense, we have entered a mode of more pure scientific discovery – and I for one cannot wait.

Rise in measles cases predicted in Ebola-stricken areas

Disruptions in vaccination campaigns during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa could lead to as many as 16,000 deaths from measles in the coming months unless a rapid response is undertaken to vaccinate young children soon, scientists predict.

Countries struck hardest by the Ebola epidemic — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — have fallen behind in measles vaccination, with thousands of children now unprotected from the disease. The first measles shot is normally given between 9 and 15 months of age followed by a booster shot years later.

Writing in the March 13

Number-crunching the Higgs boson: meet the world's largest distributed computer grid

The CERN datacentre is the ground zero, but only part, of a worldwide computing grid Maximillien Brice/CERN, CC BY-NC-ND

The world’s largest science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, has potentially delivered one of physics' “Holy Grails” in the form of the Higgs boson. Much of the science came down to one number – 126, the Higgs boson’s mass as measured in gigaelectronvolts. But this three-digit number rested upon something very much larger and more complicated: the more than 60,000 trillion bytes (60 petabytes) of data produced by colliding subatomic particles in four years of experiments, and the enormous computer power needed to make sense of it all.

There is no single supercomputer at CERN responsible for this task. Aside from anything else, the political faffing that would have ensued from having to decide where to build such a machine would have slowed scientific progress. The actual solution is technically, and politically, much more clever: a distributed computing grid spread across academic facilities around the world.

Many hands make lighter work

This solution is the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), the world’s largest distributed computing grid spread over 174 facilities in 40 countries. By distributing the computational workload around the planet, the vast torrents of precious particle data streaming from the collider can be delivered, processed, and pored over by thousands of physicists regardless of location or time of day or night.

CERN’s datacentre is considered Tier 0 and is linked by dedicated fast fibre-optic links to 15 Tier 1 facilities in Europe and the US, and a further 160 Tier 2 facilities around the world. At Tier 0 the rate of data throughput hits around 10GB/s – about the equivalent of filling two DVDs every second.

UK universities linked up to the GridPP. GridPP

During the first “season” of experiments on the LHC, now known as Run 1, the WLCG used up to 485,000 computer processing cores to crunch its way through around 2M sets of calculations a day. Around 10% of this number-crunching was performed by the GridPP Collaboration, the UK’s contribution to the WLCG funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Today Tier 0 is processing around one million billion bytes (a petabyte, or 1PB) every day – equivalent to about 210,000 DVDs.

But the grid has grown into something more - an expert community that has tirelessly turned technology into ground-breaking physics results. Now, with Run 2 and a second season of LHC experiments due to start this month, the same experts will need to manage even greater amounts of data produced by particle collisions of even greater energy.

Harder, better, faster, stronger

Not only will Run 2 nearly double the experiments' collision energy in order to probe theories such as supersymmetry, extra dimensions and magnetic monopoles – this round of humans vs protons will result in almost three times as many collisions per second in the collider. This increase will allow the properties of the Higgs boson to be studied in greater detail, perhaps even giving some understanding of why the particle that gives mass to others also has mass of its own.

Plotting the path of every particle and fragment generates data by the warehouse-full. ALICE/CERN

However, the debris left by exploded hadrons was hard enough to pick through last time – left as it was, the grid would have required six times the computational capacity in order to cope with the size of the figurative haystack in which physicists are looking for needles. But the grid has been upgraded alongside the experimental apparatus to cope with demand.

Evolution, not revolution

New techniques introduced to cope with the experiments' demands include multi-core processing. In order to compensate for the diminishing advances in processor speed, multi-core CPUs – processors designed as two, four or even eight CPUs in a single package – are being rolled out as worker nodes throughout the grid.

This has meant physicists have to rewrite their code to be multi-threaded in order to take advantage of the multiple cores by sending them tasks in parallel, but the result is much improved processing speeds. The grid then has to cleverly manage how these tasks are shared within a single site – not a trivial task when each site typically has thousands of nodes.

The huge amount of data transferred between sites also puts a burden on networks. This has been reduced by using xrootd, a high-level protocol that provides a means for scientists to access the huge datasets stored across the grid in the most network-efficient way possible. By implementing a dynamic data placement policy, the grid can learn how many copies to make of popular datasets and where best to put them for optimum performance.

It’s hard to say if Run 2 will give us answers to life, the universe, and everything. There are certainly a lot of scientists whose careers depend on some kind of new physics emerging from the four experimental detectors spaced around the LHC’s 27km circuit. Some will find what they’re looking for; others will not. But they will all rely for their work on the expertise of the computing technology team who support the world’s largest planet-wide computing network for many years to come.