Hasta La Gadget!

The White House chief of staff’s insult has been transformed.

Using a technique called reinforcement learning, a researcher at Google Brain has shown that virtual robots can redesign their body parts to help them navigate challenging obstacle courses—even if the solutions they come up with are completely bizarre.

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Unlike smartphones or even PCs, gaming consoles are something you buy once every 5 or so years and almost never upgrade. Their value comes primarily from the new games that arrive annually and the updates that extend the device’s functionality way beyond the original release. Often without having to buy a new part or peripheral. One such update lands for … Continue reading

About a week ago based on data from Mixpanel, it was suggested that adoption of iOS 12 was sitting around 46%. This wasn’t official but as it turns out, Mixpanel did come pretty close as according to Apple’s own official figures posted on its Developer page (via 9to5Mac), they have confirmed that iOS 12 has been installed on over 50% of iOS devices to date.

To be more specific, Apple says that iOS 12 is installed on 50% of all compatible iOS devices that are eligible for the update, and breaking this down further, Apple has also stated that 53% of iOS devices introduced in the past four years are running on iOS 12. Based on this adoption rate, it seems that iOS 12 has indeed manage to surpass iOS 11 in terms of adoption.

iOS 11 took almost a month longer compared to iOS 12 to hit the 50% mark, but that’s not surprising given that iOS 11 seemed to be plagued by weird bugs, such as a calculator bug and autocorrect bug which aren’t new features, which means that they shouldn’t have been buggy to begin with.

iOS 12 also seems to have improved performance on older devices which probably help encourage faster adoption. It isn’t the perfect build as there are some issues with it, but for the most part these issues don’t really seem to be hampering day-to-day usage of devices.

Apple Confirms iOS 12 Installed On 50% Of Devices , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

How about a game of chutes and ladders? Uh, I mean snakes and ladders. Look, snakes are nature’s creepiest creation and robots are man’s creepiest creation. So naturally, scientists had to combine them both for maximum terror. While we’re at it, let’s make these robotic creepy crawlies climb ladders, cause you know, we wouldn’t want humans getting away.

Seriously though, a snake is a great design for robotics. They can slither in and out of small spaces to look for damage in structures or rescue someone trapped under rubble, plus they can handle all kinds of terrain. But just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should. Because now researchers have taught robot snakes to climb ladders. There goes your second story escape plan.

Researchers from the Kyoto University and University of Electro-Communications have developed a robot snake that can bend and twist its segmented body, allowing it to slowly wrap itself around each rung as it climbs a ladder.

Good job researchers. Now, where are we going to go to escape robot snakes? I built a treehouse specifically to escape them and I just know that when I go up there next, now I’m going to find a bunch of robot snakes up there reading dirty mags, which is my job.

[via iEEE via Gizmodo]