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List of C++ software and tools

This is a list of notable software and programming tools for the C++ programming language, including libraries, web frameworks, programming language implementations, compilers, integrated development environments (IDEs), and other related software development utilities. == Compilers and IDEs == AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler — proprietary fork of LLVM + Clang for Linux C++Builder — rapid application development (RAD) environment Clang – compiler front end for C, C++, and Objective-C, part of LLVM CLion — C++ IDE by JetBrains Code::Blocks — open-source cross-platform IDE that supports multiple compilers including GCC, Clang and Visual C++ CodeLite — cross-platform IDE for the C/C++ programming languages using the wxWidgets toolkit CodeSynthesis XSD – XML Data Binding compiler Dev-C++ — MinGW or TDM-GCC 64bit port of the GCC as its compiler GCC – GNU Compiler Collection Intel C++ Compiler – proprietary high-performance compiler by Intel KDevelop — IDE part of the KDE project and is based on KDE Frameworks and Qt, the C/C++ backend uses Clang. Microsoft Visual C++ – proprietary C++ compiler and IDE for Windows Oracle Developer Studio — Solaris, OpenSolaris, RHEL, and Oracle Linux operating systems. Qt Creator — part of the SDK for the Qt GUI application development framework and uses the Qt API SlickEdit — text editor and IDE Turbo C++ – legacy C++ IDE and compiler popular in the 1990s Understand — IDE that enables static code analysis through an array of visuals, documentation, and metric tools. Visual Studio — integrated development environment by Microsoft that supports C++ Visual Studio Code — integrated development environment by Microsoft that supports C++ Xcode — Apple IDE to develop macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS that supports C++ source code. == Debuggers == Allinea DDT – a graphical debugger dbx — a proprietary source-level debugger GNU Debugger – portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems Modular Debugger — a C/C++ source level debugger for Solaris and derivates Undo LiveRecorder — time travel debugger == Libraries == Active Template Library – template-based C++ classes developed by Microsoft Apache MXNet — deep learning framework Apache Xerces – parsing, validating, and serializing and manipulating XML. Asio — networking and low-level I/O library Bitpit — scientific computing and mesh manipulation library Boost — collection of peer-reviewed libraries Botan — cryptography library C++ AMP – easy way to write programs that compile and execute on data-parallel hardware, such as graphics cards and GPUs C++ Standard Library — standard library for the language C++/WinRT — library for Microsoft's Windows Runtime platform, designed to provide access to modern Windows APIs. C3D Toolkit — geometric modeling kernel Caffe — deep learning framework CAPD — library for rigorous numerics and dynamical systems Cassowary — constraint-solving toolkit that efficiently solves systems of linear equalities and inequalities Cinder — library for creative coding ClanLib — cross-platform game SDK CMU Sphinx — speech recognition system Crypto++ — cryptographic algorithms library Dlib — general-purpose cross-platform library Dune — partial differential equations using grid-based methods fastText — text representation and text classification library FLTK — GUI toolkit Geospatial Data Abstraction Library — geospatial data access library GDCM — image library General Polygon Clipper — polygon clipping library GiNaC — computer algebra system that uses Class Library for Numbers for implementing arbitrary-precision arithmetic GLFW — OpenGL and window management library HarfBuzz — text rendering and typesetting library High Efficiency Image File Format — digital container format for storing individual digital images and image sequences ITK — image analysis library Integrated Performance Primitives — domain-specific functions that are highly optimized for diverse Intel architectures Jackets library — GPU computing library JSBSim — open-source flight dynamics model JUCE — framework for audio applications KDE Frameworks — collection of libraries from the KDE project KFRlib — digital signal processing framework LEMON — library for optimization and graph problems LevelDB — key–value database library Libdash — MPEG-DASH streaming library libLAS — reading and writing geospatial data encoded in the ASPRS laser (LAS) file format libsigc++ — typesafe callbacks LibRaw — free and open-source software library for reading raw files from digital cameras libSBML — application programming interface (API) for the SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language) LIBSVM — sequential minimal optimization (SMO) algorithm for kernelized support vector machines Libx — DirectX .X files graphics library Loki — collection of design patterns LIVE555 — multimedia streaming library Metakit — embedded database library Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit — deep learning toolkit Microsoft Foundation Class Library — object-oriented library for developing desktop applications for Windows Microsoft SEAL — homomorphic encryption library mlpack — machine learning and AI library Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit — robotics research library Object Windows Library — Object Windows Library, superseded by VCL Open Cascade — CAD and 3D modeling library Open Asset Import Library — 3D model import library to provide a common API for different 3D asset file formats OpenCV – computer vision and machine learning library OpenFOAM — computational fluid dynamics toolkit OpenH264 — real-time encoding and decoding video streams in the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format OpenImageIO — image processing library Open Inventor — higher layer of programming for OpenGL OpenNN — neural networks library OpenVDB — sparse volume data library openFrameworks — creative coding toolkit OpenRTM-aist — robotics middleware library Oracle Template Library — database access that supports IBM Db2 and Open Database Connectivity Orfeo toolbox — remote sensing image processing library OR-Tools — operations research and optimization library Parallel Augmented Maps — ordered sets, ordered maps, and augmented maps. Parallel Patterns Library — Microsoft library that provides features for multicore programming PhysX — physics simulation engine POCO C++ Libraries — general-purpose libraries for software development Poppler — PDF rendering library Protocol Buffers — data serialization library Qt — cross-platform widget toolkit QuantLib — quantitative finance library RocksDB — key–value database library ROOT — data analysis framework from CERN ROS — robotics middleware Scintilla — source code editing component SDL – Simple DirectMedia Layer, cross-platform development library for multimedia applications SFML – Simple and Fast Multimedia Library Shark – open-source machine learning library Shogun — machine learning toolbox Skia — 2D graphics library Snappy — compression library Sound Object Library — music and audio development Standard Template Library — library of containers and algorithms Stapl — parallel computing library SymbolicC++ — symbolic computation library TerraLib — GIS library Tesseract OCR — optical character recognition engine Threading Building Blocks — parallel computing library ThreadWeaver — concurrency framework Tiny-dnn — lightweight deep learning library TinyXML — lightweight XML parser Tkrzw — key–value databases VTD-XML — XML processing library wxWidgets — cross-platform GUI toolkit x265 — video encoding library for HEVC XGBoost — gradient boosting library Windows Template Library — Win32 development === Mathematical and numerical libraries === == Tools == Akonadi — a C++/Qt framework and storage service for personal information management BALL – framework and set of algorithms and data structures for molecular modelling and computational structural bioinformatics Boehm garbage collector – conservative garbage collector CEGUI — C++ GUI library ClanLib – video game SDK CMake — cross-platform build system for C++ projects Confidential Consortium Framework – blockchain infrastructure framework DaviX – WebDAV client Doxygen — documentation generator for C++ and other languages FLTK — Fast Light Toolkit, cross-platform GUI library Fox toolkit — C++ GUI toolkit GDB — GNU Project debugger, often used with C and C++ gtkmm — official C++ interface for the popular GUI library GTK HOOPS Visualize — 3D computer graphics HPX — partitioned global address space Parallel programming Runtime System JUCE — cross-platform C++ audio and GUI framework LessTif — free clone of Motif GUI toolkit MFC — Microsoft Foundation Class library Nana — modern C++ GUI toolkit PTK Toolkit — 2D rendering engine and SDK, and portability options. Qt — cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit Rogue Wave — C++ GUI toolkit TnFOX — C++ GUI toolkit Ultimate++ — cross-platform C++ GUI framework Valgrind — tool suite for debugging and profiling C/C++ programs wxWidgets — cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit x265 — encoder for creating digital video streams in the High Efficiency Vid
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AI Snake Oil

AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference is a 2024 non-fiction book written by scholars Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. It is a critique of the tech industry's overly inflated promises and capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) as well as a debunking of the flawed science fueling AI hype while attempting to outline both the potential positives and negatives that come with different modes of the technology. == Contents == === Publication === The book was published in September 2024 by the Princeton University Press. AI Snake Oil consists of 360 pages and features eight chapters, and sections for acknowledgements, references, and an index. An updated edition with a new preface and epilogue by the authors was published in September 2025. The authors use the term "AI snake oil" derived from the U.S. idiom for a fraudulent remedy, to describe overhyped AI systems. === Chapter one: Introduction === Narayanan and Kapoor argue that many individuals do not yet have the literacy to detect functioning aspects of AI compared to potential snake oil, which they identify as "AI that does not and cannot work as advertised". Some of the major examples utilized by the authors include Allstate's 2013 use of predictive AI, as well as the concern surrounding actors and AI attempting to replicate or use their likeness. Important discussions regarding discrimination are brought up and explored in the first chapter, including the false arrests of six Black individuals due to errors with AI facial recognition tools. The chapter concludes with a comparison to the Industrial Revolution, where Narayanan and Kapoor highlight the extensive human labour that is necessary for artificial intelligence technologies to function. === Chapter two: How Predictive AI Goes Wrong === Chapter two focuses on predictive artificial intelligence, and criticizes the overestimation of the capabilities of the technology. === Chapter three: Why Can't AI Predict the Future? === Chapter three works to inform the reader about the history of early computational prediction attempts, with examples from companies like Simulatics. === Chapter four: The Long Road to Generative AI === The fourth chapter goes in more in-depth in explorations of generative AI. Generative AI software examples include ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E. The section begins with a positive example of generative AI. As the chapter progresses, the authors begin to provide examples of harm produced by generative AI, including the suicide of a Belgian man after connecting with Chai, a generative chatbot. Issues of deepfakes and preservation of artistic property are also discussed. The use of generative AI to create non-consensual pornographic deepfake content is discussed in relation to female celebrities. === Chapter five: Is Advanced AI an Existential Threat? === The fifth chapter draws attention the AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. The authors describe AGI as "AI that can perform most or economically relevant tasks as effectively as any human". They summarize that many contributors to the field of artificial intelligence believe AGI to be an impending threat that demands attention. However, they argue that the perceived threat of AGI would only exist if the technology continually functioned reliably. In order to better illustrate the hype surrounding AGI, Narayanan and Kapoor use the Ladder of Generality, which is described as a visual tool in which "each rung represents a way of computing that is more flexible, and more general, than the previous one". They note that we are not yet aware of the next rungs on the ladder, or if the ladder will eventually result in a dead end. The rungs that have been identified so far are as follows: (0, or floor) special purpose hardware, (1) programmable computers, (2) stored program computers, (3) machine learning, (4) deep learning, (5) pretrained models, and, finally, (6) instruction-tuned models. The potential for future rungs and what those rungs might be are currently undetermined. The chapter also discusses the ELIZA effect, which Lawrence Switzky discusses in his article "ELIZA Effects". Switzky attributes the coined term ELIZA Effect to Sherry Turke, who defined it as "our more general tendency to treat responsive computer programs as more intelligent than they really are". === Chapter six: Why Can't AI Fix Social Media? === The sixth chapter focuses on content moderation, why it is important, and how it has been and could be affected by artificial automation. The first issue raised in regard to AI-driven content moderation is the inability for computers and machines to understand context and nuance, resulting in potential for discriminatory moderation and shadow banning. While they note that there are issues with automating content moderation, Narayanan and Kapoor also highlight the psychological impact on human content moderators and their labour. They indicate the hidden labour behind moderation, which is often outsourced to less developed countries, where labourers sort through potentially traumatizing content for pay. However, the discussion focuses more heavily on why automated moderation can be problematic, including discriminatory algorithms and lack of nuance. To balance their argument, issues of discrimination and bias are also discussed in relation the human content moderators. To automate moderation, there are two types of AI used, which are fingerprint matching and machine learning. === Chapter seven: Why Do Myths about AI Persist? === The seventh chapter outlines possible factors that contribute to hype surrounding AI. Narayanan and Kapoor explain how companies often promote their new AI models without properly disclosing how the model works, and what it is learning from. They attribute hype to several different groups, including journalists, researchers, and companies. They explain the impact of companies and the misplaced hype that they spread can be attributed to greed and a desire to grow corporate funds. For journalists, one of the stated sources of hype, they argue that news media has a tendency to prioritize financial incentives over validity and quality of writing. As well, Narayanan and Kapoor point out the emergence of company statement regurgitation in news media, leading to clickbait. Hype from researchers is potentially linked to lack of reproducibility in studies as well as leakage, which occurs when AI models are tested on their training data. === Chapter eight: Where do we go from here? === The final chapter, chapter eight, turns its attention to the future. The authors express their ideas and predictions for how the technology will evolve and be utilized in the upcoming years. == Authors == Author Narayanan is a computer science professor at Princeton University. Kapoor is a doctoral candidate at the same university, and both scholars are located at the Center for Information Technology at Princeton. In 2023, Narayanan and Kapoor appeared on the TIME100 Artificial Intelligence list, which features influential figures in the field. == Reception == Nature, a science and technology peer-reviewed journal, released an article highlighting the top "10 essential reads from the past year", listing Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor's AI Snake Oil. The article states the that text is "one of the best on this controversial subject". Elizabeth Quill, in her review of the text in Science News, writes that the authors "squarely achieve their stated goal: to empower people to distinguish AI that works well from AI snake oil". Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker writes that "compared with many technologists, Narayanan, Kapoor, and Vallor [Shannon Vallor, University of Edinburgh], are deeply skeptical about today's A.I. technology and what it can achieve. Perhaps they shouldn't be". Rothman argues, following an interview with prominent computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton of University of Toronto, that the potential for AI to replicate complexity is already here and continues to be heavily funded, enhancing the prospective capabilities of the technology. However, he does praise the author's ability to address questions regarding the existential human experience. Alexya Martinez discusses the text in a book review for Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, critiquing AI Snake Oil for its extensive focus on the West. Martinez writes that Narayanan and Kapoor "do not fully explore how AI impacts other countries", and suggests more focus on countries outside of the United States to enhance their argument.
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Monkey and banana problem

The monkey and banana problem is a famous toy problem in artificial intelligence, particularly in logic programming and planning. It has been framed as: A monkey is in a room containing a box and a bunch of bananas. The bananas are hanging from the ceiling out of reach of the monkey. How can the monkey obtain the bananas? The situation is used as a toy problem for computer science and can be solved with an expert system such as CLIPS. The example set of rules that CLIPS provides is somewhat fragile, in that, naive changes to the rulebase that might seem to a human of average intelligence to make common sense can cause the engine to fail to get the monkey to reach the banana. Other examples exist using Rules Based System (RBS), including a project implemented in Python.
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Digital organism

A digital organism is a self-replicating computer program that mutates and evolves. Digital organisms are used as a tool to study the dynamics of Darwinian evolution, and to test or verify specific hypotheses or mathematical models of evolution. The study of digital organisms is closely related to the area of artificial life. == History == Digital organisms can be traced back to the game Darwin, developed in 1961 at Bell Labs, in which computer programs had to compete with each other by trying to stop others from executing . A similar implementation that followed this was the game Core War. In Core War, it turned out that one of the winning strategies was to replicate as fast as possible, which deprived the opponent of all computational resources. Programs in the Core War game were also able to mutate themselves and each other by overwriting instructions in the simulated "memory" in which the game took place. This allowed competing programs to embed damaging instructions in each other that caused errors (terminating the process that read it), "enslaved processes" (making an enemy program work for you), or even change strategies mid-game and heal themselves. Steen Rasmussen at Los Alamos National Laboratory took the idea from Core War one step further in his core world system by introducing a genetic algorithm that automatically wrote programs. However, Rasmussen did not observe the evolution of complex and stable programs. It turned out that the programming language in which core world programs were written was very brittle, and more often than not mutations would completely destroy the functionality of a program. The first to solve the issue of program brittleness was Thomas S. Ray with his Tierra system, which was similar to core world. Ray made some key changes to the programming language such that mutations were much less likely to destroy a program. With these modifications, he observed for the first time computer programs that did indeed evolve in a meaningful and complex way. Later, Chris Adami, Titus Brown, and Charles Ofria started developing their Avida system, which was inspired by Tierra but again had some crucial differences. In Tierra, all programs lived in the same address space and could potentially execute or otherwise interfere with each other's code. In Avida, on the other hand, each program lives in its own address space. Because of this modification, experiments with Avida became much cleaner and easier to interpret than those with Tierra. With Avida, digital organism research has begun to be accepted as a valid contribution to evolutionary biology by a growing number of evolutionary biologists. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University has used Avida extensively in his work. Lenski, Adami, and their colleagues have published in journals such as Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). In 1996, Andy Pargellis created a Tierra-like system called Amoeba that evolved self-replication from a randomly seeded initial condition. More recently REvoSim - a software package based around binary digital organisms - has allowed evolutionary simulations of large populations that can be run for geological timescales.
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World model (artificial intelligence)

A world model in artificial intelligence is a machine learning system that builds an internal representation of an environment. The model predicts how that environment changes over time in response to actions. Researchers design world models to help agents plan, reason, and act without constant real-world trial and error. World models differ from systems that merely classify or generate outputs. They simulate dynamics such as physics, object interactions, and causality. Early ideas date to the 1990s. Modern versions power robots, autonomous driving, and interactive video generation. == History == Jürgen Schmidhuber introduced the term world model in machine learning in 1990. He proposed recurrent neural networks that predict future states from observations and use those predictions to train agents. David Ha and Schmidhuber revived the concept in a 2018 paper. Their agents learned to drive virtual cars and play video games inside self-generated simulations. Yann LeCun advanced the idea in a 2022 position paper titled "A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence". He argued that intelligence requires predictive models of the world rather than pure pattern matching. LeCun proposed the joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) as a practical foundation. LeCun and collaborators developed several JEPA variants. V-JEPA 2 reached state-of-the-art performance on video understanding and physical reasoning at the time. It supports zero-shot robot control in unfamiliar environments. Introduced in March 2026, LeWorldModel trains stably end-to-end from raw pixels and uses two loss terms and avoids hand-crafted heuristics. LeCun founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in 2026 to further develop world models. Google DeepMind introduced Genie in 2024. The model learned interactive environments from unlabeled internet videos. Genie 2 followed in late 2024 and added three-dimensional generation. The Genie series set benchmarks for general-purpose simulation. Genie 3 was introduced in August 2025. It produces photorealistic, real-time interactive worlds from text prompts which are displayed at 24 frames per second and explored in real time with text or image prompts. The model supports persistent three-dimensional worlds and real-time interaction. Waymo adopted Genie 3 in February 2026 and used it to create a specialized world model for autonomous driving simulation, called the Waymo World Model. It produces synchronized camera and lidar outputs and creates edge cases that real robotaxis rarely encounter. The edge cases were reported to be unusual by PCMag. General Intuition announced a $133.7 million seed round. World Labs raised $1 billion. AMI raised $1.03 billion. In April 2026, Alibaba announced Happy Oyster, its world model designed for real-time and “flowy” world model. It includes a directing mode for world building based on text and image prompts and a wandering mode for exploring the resulting world. It can generate 3-minute in-world video clips. Also in April, World Labs, co-founded by Li Fei Fei, unveiled Spark 2.0, an open-source 3D Gaussian splatting rendering engine that targets smartphone-class devices. In June 2026, Nvidia released Cosmos 3, a family of open-weight models. It combines previously independent physical reasoning, world simulation, and action generation. Cosmos 3 integrates can process and generate text, image, video, audio, and action sequences. The model employs a Mixture-of-Transformers" (MoT) approach. An autoregressive (AR) transformer handles reasoning and next-token prediction, while a diffusion transformer (DT) does multimodal generation. Encoders (ViT for vision, VAE for visual/audio, and domain-specific for actions) and generate a shared representation space using 3D multi-dimensional rotary position embedding (mRoPE) for spatial and temporal information. The family includes Cosmos3-Nano (16B parameters) for workstations; Cosmos3-Super (64B parameters) for research. == Architecture == World models process raw sensory data such as video frames or lidar scans. They compress this input into compact latent representations. The system then predicts future representations rather than pixel-by-pixel reconstructions. Many modern world models use joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA). An encoder turns observations into embeddings. A predictor estimates one or a suite of embeddings from the current one and an action. In some cases a critic chooses one embedding as the best result. A regularizer keeps embeddings well-behaved. The model trains by minimizing prediction error in embedding space. This approach avoids the high cost of generating every detail. Some architectures add explicit components. A fast reactive path handles immediate responses. A slower deliberative path performs longer-horizon planning. Video prediction accuracy or robot success rates are key metrics, but do not always predict real-world performance. Generative world models such as Genie 3 combine these with a simulator. They accept text prompts or layouts and output consistent video, lidar, or three-dimensional scenes. World models often train with self-supervised learning. They use large unlabeled datasets of video or robot interactions. Self-supervised learning can speed learning. Reinforcement learning can fine-tune a model for specific tasks. == Applications == World models support robot learning. Agents train inside simulations and transfer skills to the physical world. This reduces the need for dangerous or expensive real-world trials. Autonomous vehicles use world models to test rare events. Waymo's system simulates tornadoes or unusual pedestrian behavior. Companies train planners without putting vehicles on public roads. Interactive entertainment benefits from world models. Genie 3 lets users generate playable environments from simple descriptions. Game studios prototype levels faster. Scientific simulation gains from these models. Researchers model physical systems or biological processes at scale. Planners in logistics or urban design test strategies inside accurate digital twins. == Comparison with large language models == Both world models and large language models (LLMs) use inferencing on their inputs to make predictions. LLMs operate on textual inputs. They predict the next token in text sequences. They excel at language-oriented tasks such as translation or summarization. However, they lack understanding of physics. World models operate on sensor inputs such as pixels. They predict state changes in that data in latent space. This design supports planning and causal reasoning. LLMs generate fluent text but often fail at consistent physical predictions. Their architecture employs transformers with refinements such as mixture of experts. World models divide an inferencing task into work performed by encoders, predictors, simulators, and other pieces. They typically handle multimodal inputs such as video, lidar, radar, and audio, guided by textual prompting. LLMs power chatbots and code assistants. World models drive embodied agents that act in dynamic environments, such as autonomous driving. The two may be combined in hybrid systems. For example, a LLM handles instructions, while a world model manages low-level control. World model proponents such as LeCun claim that because LLMs are trained only on text, they have no ability to predict anything beyond text, such as real-world events. == Benchmarks == World model benchmarks test physical understanding, long-term consistency, planning, and generalization from sensor data. Meta introduced three benchmarks for V-JEPA 2. IntPhys 2 measures a model's ability to detect physics violations. It presents pairs of videos that diverge when one breaks physical rules. Humans score near 100% accuracy. V-JEPA 2 achieves little better than random chance on many conditions. Minimal Video Pairs (MVPBench) tests physical understanding through multiple-choice questions based on short video clips. It probes object interactions and causality. Something-Something tests action recognition. Epic-Kitchens-100 tests human action anticipation. DeepMind benchmark: Interactive evaluation measures consistency over minutes of interaction, memory of off-screen objects, and response to user actions or text prompts. Waymo benchmark: Output generation quality: Metrics include realism, controllability (via text prompts), and usefulness for training planners in simulated worlds. However, pixel reconstruction error rate with episodic rewards often fails. Other: Epic-Kitchens-100 (often measured with Recall@5) Ego4D 50 Salads, Breakfast, etc. Potential benchmarks: Zero-shot transfer to robots Long-horizon planning Implausible prediction rate
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Your AI Slop Bores Me

Your AI Slop Bores Me (stylized in all lowercase) is a website and social experiment created by programmer Mihir Maroju. Serving as a parody of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude, all questions and image prompts posed by users are answered by other, randomly-selected human users of the site. As of March 2026, the site has reached 50 million hits and sits at 16,000 concurrent users. == Background == In an interview with Fast Company, Maroju said he was inspired to create the site by his frustration with AI proliferating the internet with AI generated content, saying the site came from "a frustration for AI art and its proliferation, making artists' lives worse and also just filling the internet with low-effort generic slop". == Overview == The site has a credit system, in which a first-time user will be given 1 credit for free. Every 10 minutes, if a user has 0 credits, they will receive 2 credits. Once the credits are used up, the user can no longer do prompts unless the user earns them. The user can earn credits by responding to other user's prompts by "larping as AI" while given a 75-second time limit. Prompts can either be for a written response, or a drawing for the other user to fulfill the prompt. The maximum amount of credits a user can have is 6 credits, and cannot exceed the maximum limit. If the prompting user activates "thinking mode", the countdown is extended to 150 seconds for the cost of 2 credits. == Reception == The site has garnered attention and praise from X users, and across many online communities. The Daily Dot's Rachel Kiley wrote that "the best part about the game is that there's really no right or wrong way to do it. Humans aren't LLMs trained on copyrighted material and the whole of the free internet, but we do retain a certain amount of the information we've learned from those things over the course of our lives, while also being capable of creativity". Chris Taylor of Mashable called the site "amateurish and charming". Aftermath's Nicole Carpenter wrote that the site reminded her of "the human touch of chaos".
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The Last Question

"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly; and in the anthologies in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 (1990). While he also considered it one of his best works, "The Last Question" was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. Through successive generations, humanity questions Multivac on the subject of entropy. The story blends science fiction, theology, and philosophy. It has been recognized as a counterpoint to Fredric Brown's short short story "Answer", published two years earlier. == History == In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterized computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation of his work, Asimov "privately" concluded that the story was his best science fiction yet written. He placed it just higher than "The Ugly Little Boy" (September 1958) and "The Bicentennial Man" (1976). The story asks the question of humanity's fate, and human existence as a whole, highlighting Asimov's focus on important aspects of our future like population growth and environmental issues. "The Last Question" ranks with "Nightfall" (1941) as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories. He wrote in 1973 that he appreciated how easy the story was to write after he had the idea. He was so often approached by fans who remembered the story but not the title, that in one instance he gave the answer, correctly, before the fan had even described the story. == Plot summary == By the year 2061, Multivac, a self-adjusting and self-correcting computer, has allowed mankind to reach beyond the planetary confines of Earth and harness solar energy. Two technicians, Adell and Lupov, celebrate Multivac's role in this development. Over drinks, they discuss that the sun will expire due to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy inevitably increases. When Adell asks Multivac whether this can be reversed, the computer responds that it has insufficient data to answer. In several episodes over ten trillion years, increasingly advanced humans pose the same question to the computers of their time. Each time the computer gives the same response. At the heat death of the universe, the last disembodied consciousness of Man asks the question a final time of a computer that resides in hyperspace before merging with it. After collecting the last data from the dead universe, the computer continues to process it alone and finds an answer to the last question. Having no one to tell it to, it proceeds to demonstrate by saying "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" == Themes == === Philosophy === Although science and religion are frequently presented as having an oppositional relationship, "The Last Question" explores some biblical contexts ("Let there be light"). In Asimov's story, aspects like the great meaning of existence are culminated through both technology and human knowledge. The evolution from Multivac to AC also emulates a sort of cycle of existence. === Dystopian happy ending === Multivac's purpose was conceptualized with a desire for knowledge, promoting the idea that more knowledge will lead to a better and more fruitful future for humanity. However, the computer's answers regarding the future suggest an inevitable exhaustion of the Sun, and this thirst for knowledge becomes an obsession with the future. The story's end displays a dichotomy between annihilation and peace. == Dramatic adaptations == === Planetarium shows === "The Last Question" was first adapted for the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University (in 1966), featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy, as Asimov wrote in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt (1980). It was adapted for the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York (in 1969), under the direction of Ian C. McLennan. It was adapted for the Edmonton Space Sciences Centre in Edmonton, Alberta (early 1970s), under the direction of John Hault. It was adapted for the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Natural History in 1973 under the direction of Mark B. Peterson It subsequently played at the: Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1973 Planetarium of the Reading School District in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1974 Buhl Planetarium, Pittsburgh in 1974 The Space Transit Planetarium of the Museum of Science in Miami during 1977 Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport New York, in 1978, read by singer-songwriter and Long Island resident Harry Chapin. Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City, Utah (in 1980 and 1989) A reading of the story was played on BBC Radio 7 in 2008 and 2009. Gates Planetarium in Denver, Colorado (in early 2020) In 1989 Asimov updated the star show adaptation to add in quasars and black holes. The story was adapted as a comic book by Don Thompson and drawn by John Estes in the third issue of ORBiT.
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Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising

Hostile Waters, released as Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising in America, is a hybrid vehicle and strategy game developed and published by Rage Software for Microsoft Windows. It was inspired by Carrier Command (Realtime Games, 1988). It has won several awards and one unofficial award from Rock Paper Shotgun as a "lost classic" or "The best game you've never played". == Plot == Hostile Waters takes place in a Utopian future where war has been abolished. In the year 2012, a revolutionary war takes place between the corrupt and power-hungry politicians, leaders and businessmen (described as the "Old Guard") and the people. The Old Guard were defeated, with only a few of their leaders escaping. By 2032, the world has been rebuilt as a utopia, with the help of nano-technological assemblers, which are used in "creation engines" to create matter from energy and waste, for free. The newly united world is governed from a capital city known as Central. Missile attacks are suddenly launched against major cities all over the world from an unknown location. This is eventually discovered to be an island chain in the South Pacific Ocean. A response to the missile attacks was a special forces team sent in to investigate the area for preliminary investigations. The Ministry of Intelligence (MinIntel) loses contact with it shortly thereafter. The world government authorises a reactivation of the Antaeus program, a series of warships able to create any weapon of their choosing using their on-board nano-technological creation engine. Two of these were left on the seabed in the case of an emergency, capable of being re-activated and refloating itself. On board are a series of "soulcatcher" chips, a classified 1990s military program researched into for the storage of human brain functions on a silicon chip. The soulcatcher technology was used to store the minds of every crew member ever assigned to an Antaeus vessel. It is soon discovered that one of the cruisers does not respond to the awakening signal. The other cruiser, however, is refloated and re-activated, with heavy damage to vital ship components. A course is plotted for a nearby disused wet-dock. As the Antaeus progresses from the wet-dock, unusual biological life-forms are discovered amongst the enemy bases on the islands. The identity of the aggressor firing the missiles is confirmed as the leftovers of the old, pre-Central forces, known as the Cabal. Outnumbering Central's army a thousand to one, they are fighting with thousands of troops and weapons that they hid away when it was apparent that the war was lost. The Antaeus is deployed into the chicane to stop the Cabal's operations there. It's later discovered that along with their superior numbers, they have also biologically engineered a species of organic machines, designed in the popular likeness of extraterrestrials, which they intend to use to create the fear of an alien invasion, to facilitate their taking over the world and the removal of the public use of creation engines. The Cabal later lose control of the species, which eventually turns on its masters, destroying them. The species starts spreading, modifying the planetary climate and geographical features in an attempt to exterminate humanity and make the planet more hospitable to itself. Having exterminated its creators, the species resolves to cleanse humanity as a whole from the planet using a massive 'disassembler cannon', only to be stopped by the Antaeus. The species subsequently attempts to flee into the cosmos and colonise the surrounding planets and stars, by launching a massive number of 'culture stones' (information devices that also double as creation engines) into space from an enormous, artificially-grown organic "island", the final staging point. Central's only option is to bind the Antaeus' creation engine and the disassembler cannon stolen from the aliens together to create a makeshift bomb, and detonate it at the central "column" containing the culture stones. The plan succeeds, and the Antaeus is sacrificed to save the world. The final cinematic show the organic disassembler cannon and the Antaeus' creation engine moving closer together and fusing, creating something new. A post-credits scene also shows that two of the species' culture stones have managed to get into space. == Gameplay == Each Mission takes place on and or near a fortified enemy island containing various forms of anti-air and ground defence, with scattered unit-production complexes powered by oil-derricks and fuel containers (which are dependent on the oil-derricks) that the player can destroy to keep the enemy from replacing destroyed forces. Vehicles are built on the Antaeus and, if desired, land vehicles can be delivered to a location by the air-lifting "magpie". Units are created by providing Antaeus with a number of resources which are obtained at the beginning of the level and debris which are taken from destroyed enemy units and structures. Transport helicopters such as the "Pegasus" can fly to an object and airlift it to the ship-board recycling system with little resources required. The carrier can analyse objects it disassembles at the rear of the Antaeus cruiser, and several of the game's vehicles and items are unlocked by "sampling" them in this fashion. The game has a number of vehicles that are progressively unlocked as the missions progress. Vehicles contain a number of slots for equipment and a selection of different types of weapons to use in the vehicle. A variety of vehicle equipment combinations can be designed. Vehicles have an individual damage multiplier such that different vehicles with the same weapon will do different damage. In addition to this, each soul-chip personality specializes in one unit along with specific equipment, which, if equipped will gain them a bonus in efficiency. == Development == The game was developed by 12 people. == Reception == The game received "favourable" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Carla Harker of NextGen said, "You'll feel like a real battlefield general when you take to the field in Antaeus Rising." Jake The Snake of GamePro said, "If the usual game categories leave you unscathed, get bloodied in these Hostile Waters."
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Toy problem

In scientific disciplines, a toy problem or a puzzlelike problem is a problem that is not of immediate scientific interest, yet is used as an expository device to illustrate a trait that may be shared by other, more complicated, instances of the problem, or as a way to explain a particular, more general, problem solving technique. A toy problem is useful to test and demonstrate methodologies. Researchers can use toy problems to compare the performance of different algorithms. They are also good for game designing. For instance, while engineering a large system, the large problem is often broken down into many smaller toy problems which have been well understood in detail. Often these problems distill a few important aspects of complicated problems so that they can be studied in isolation. Toy problems are thus often very useful in providing intuition about specific phenomena in more complicated problems. As an example, in the field of artificial intelligence, classical puzzles, games and problems are often used as toy problems. These include sliding-block puzzles, N-Queens problem, missionaries and cannibals problem, tic-tac-toe, chess, Tower of Hanoi and others.
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Padre Pio (2022 film)

Padre Pio is a 2022 biographical drama film co-written and directed by Abel Ferrara. It stars Shia LaBeouf as the titular role of Padre Pio, a Capuchin Franciscan priest who receives the stigmata, in the background of the World War I in Italy. The film is a co-production of Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom. During its production, LaBeouf converted to Catholicism as result of his spiritual experiences in character as Pio, who is venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church. The film had its world premiere in the Giornate degli Autori section of the 79th Venice International Film Festival on 2 September 2022. It was released theatrically in the United Kingdom on 26 January 2024 by Dazzler Media and in Italy on 18 July 2024 by RS Productions. == Plot == It is the year 1920. Italian WWI veterans have returned to their impoverished villages. Padre Pio arrives at San Giovanni Rotondo after living with his family in Pietrelcina for a number of years. While still sick, he continues to encounter Satan. Satan reveals himself as the instigator of the war and the sociopolitical problems of San Giovanni. While having little contact with the people of this town, Padre Pio learns what the poor are suffering from in the Sacrament of Confession and the Holy Mass, such as when a crippled man walks again because of Padre Pio's prayer. Besides the effects of war, such as medical inadequacy, health conditions and labourers dying from the effects of mustard gas, the people suffer from corrupt, wealthy landowners. Gerardo, a militaristic anti-socialist, threatens to kill any communal labourers tending his land. Many of them join the socialist party as a way to improve their lives. However, after they win the first free election in San Giovanni, Gerardo's forces massacre many of them. Padre Pio asks God that he may become a suffering servant for their salvation. He receives the wounds of Jesus Christ. The stigmata disrupts Satan's influence on San Giovanni Rotondo. == Cast == Shia LaBeouf as Padre Pio Marco Leonardi as Gerardo Salvatore Ruocco as Vincenzo Cristina Chiriac as Giovanna Brando Pacitto as Renato Luca Lionello as Silvestro Asia Argento as Tall Man == Production == According to Abel Ferrara, actor Willem Dafoe suggested that Shia LaBeouf should be cast for the film's leading role. After Ferrara held several Zoom calls with LaBeouf, the latter agreed to join the film, even though very little money was raised (the film was almost never made) and LaBeouf did the project for free. LaBeouf arrived at Old Mission Santa Inés in July 2021 to learn about Padre Pio with the Capuchin Franciscan friars. Thanks to Father Bobby Barbato and Brother Jude Quinto, Br. Alexander Rodriguez met LaBeouf while he attended Mass every day. He learned about the Catholic Church and the Capuchins while living in his truck or spending a few nights in the Capuchin's guest room. He was immersing himself in the Catholic faith. He enrolled in RCIA, revised the script with Rodriguez and trained to do the Latin Mass. Rodriguez traveled with LaBeouf as his spiritual adviser and catechist and was in the film as Padre Pio's companion. Filming occurred in Apulia, Italy, in December 2021. The first place was at the Capuchin friary in San Marco la Catola. Padre Pio exchanged letters with his provincial and spiritual director while living in Pietrelcina with his family. The time was around 1909–1916. Both directors were living in San Marco during these years. Padre Pio expressed in his letters his deep and mysterious relationship with God and health difficulties. This event is in the film. While filming, LaBeouf slept in Padre Pio's bedroom. After San Marco, filming continued outside the Sanctuary of Saint Michael the Archangel in Monte Sant'Angelo. Traditionally, St. Michael appeared here in the late 400s. LaBeouf stayed and filmed for a few weeks at the Abbey of Saint Mary of Pulsano. It is near the sanctuary. The rest of the filming took place outside the sanctuary. Ferrara said in 2024 that he used AI for the Italian dub of this film. == Release == Padre Pio had its world premiere in the Giornate degli Autori section of the 79th Venice International Film Festival on 2 September 2022. It received a four-minute ovation. It also competed at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival. At the Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival, it was chosen to compete for the "Best Film Award." During its North American premiere at the Mammoth Film Festival, it won the "Achievement for Filmmaking" award for cinematography. At the Taormina Film Festival, it premiered worldwide in Italian. In March 2023, Gravitas Ventures acquired North American rights to the film. It was released in select theaters and on video on demand in the United States on 2 June 2023. The film was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland on 26 January 2024 by Dazzler Media. RS Productions released it in Italy on 18 July 2024. == Reception == On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 30% based on 43 reviews, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Tonally unbalanced and burdened with a distracting Shia LaBeouf performance, Padre Pio is one of Abel Ferrara's less divine works." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 45 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.. Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a negative review, describing it as "clunky" and criticizing its political themes for possessing "the subtlety of a cartoon for preschoolers." Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com gave the film one and a half stars out of four, describing it as a "dull slog". Journalist Glenn Kenny of The New York Times found the film "occasionally rank" and panned LaBeouf's performance, though complimented Ferrara's "sometimes Brechtian consideration of the nodes of political history and spirituality." Film critic Armond White of National Review also criticized the film, describing it as "a work of deluded, semi-improvisational navel-gazing". Film critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film a positive review, with three out of five stars, writing that it is "a weird film...with an undeveloped, improvised feel, like a fragment or shard of something else. Yet there is a background hum there...an awareness of something dark and malign. It is a minor film but interesting." Writing for The New Yorker, Richard Brody considered that "in its hectic, scattershot way, Padre Pio feels very much of the desperate present day," describing it as "a historical drama without historical distance" and "a wild effort to reach the immediate experience of the past and its furies." Faith-based reviews for the film were generally negative. It received negative reviews from Catholic Answers, The Catholic World Report, The Catholic Weekly, The Catholic Thing, and Crisis Magazine. Conversely, it received a mixed review from The Catholic Review, as well as a positive review from America. Criticisms were generally aimed at the film's sexual content and perceived support of left-wing politics.
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Clinical decision support system

A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a form of health information technology that provides clinicians, staff, patients, or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information to enhance decision-making in clinical workflows. CDSS tools include alerts and reminders, clinical guidelines, condition-specific order sets, patient data summaries, diagnostic support, and context-aware reference information. They often leverage artificial intelligence to analyze clinical data and help improve care quality and safety. CDSSs constitute a major topic in artificial intelligence in medicine. == Characteristics == A clinical decision support system is an active knowledge system that uses variables of patient data to produce advice regarding health care. This implies that a CDSS is simply a decision support system focused on using knowledge management. === Purpose === The main purpose of modern CDSS is to assist clinicians at the point of care. This means that clinicians interact with a CDSS to help to analyze and reach a diagnosis based on patient data for different diseases. In the early days, CDSSs were conceived to make decisions for the clinician in a literal manner. The clinician would input the information and wait for the CDSS to output the "right" choice, and the clinician would simply act on that output. However, the modern methodology of using CDSSs to assist means that the clinician interacts with the CDSS, utilizing both their knowledge and the CDSS's, better to analyse the patient's data than either a human or a CDSS could do on their own. Typically, a CDSS makes suggestions for the clinician to review, and the clinician is expected to pick out useful information from the presented results and discount erroneous CDSS suggestions. The two main types of CDSS are knowledge-based systems and non-knowledge-based (machine learning–based) systems: An example of how a clinician might use a clinical decision support system is a diagnosis decision support system (DDSS). DDSS requests some of the patient's data and, in response, proposes a set of possible diagnoses. The physician then takes the output of the DDSS and determines which diagnoses are likely and which are not, and, if necessary, orders further tests to narrow down the diagnosis. Another example of a CDSS would be a case-based reasoning (CBR) system. A CBR system might use previous case data to help determine the appropriate amount of beams and the optimal beam angles for use in radiotherapy for brain cancer patients; medical physicists and oncologists would then review the recommended treatment plan to determine its viability. Another important classification of a CDSS is based on the timing of its use. Physicians use these systems at the point of care to help them as they are dealing with a patient, with the timing of use being either pre-diagnosis, during diagnosis, or post-diagnosis. Pre-diagnosis CDSS systems help the physician prepare the diagnoses. CDSSs help review and filter the physician's preliminary diagnostic choices to improve outcomes. Post-diagnosis CDSS systems are used to mine data to derive connections between patients and their past medical history and clinical research to predict future events. Early speculation that AI-based decision support would replace clinicians in common tasks has largely given way to a consensus around assistive models, in which AI augments rather than supplants clinical judgment. Contemporary deep learning-based systems, unlike earlier rule-based tools, can be trained directly on clinical data without manual rule authoring and integrated into electronic health record workflows at the point of care. Another approach, used by the National Health Service in England, is to use a CDSS to triage medical conditions out of hours by suggesting a suitable next step to the patient (e.g. call an ambulance, or see a general practitioner on the next working day). The suggestion, which may be disregarded by either the patient or the phone operative if common sense or caution suggests otherwise, is based on the known information and an implicit conclusion about what the worst-case diagnosis is likely to be; it is not always revealed to the patient because it might well be incorrect and is not based on a medically-trained person's opinion - it is only used for initial triage purposes. === Knowledge-based === Most CDSSs consist of three parts: the knowledge base, an inference engine, and a mechanism to communicate. The knowledge base contains the rules and associations of compiled data which most often take the form of IF-THEN rules. If this was a system for determining drug interactions, then a rule might be that IF drug X is taken AND drug Y is taken THEN alert the user. Using another interface, an advanced user could edit the knowledge base to keep it up to date with new drugs. The inference engine combines the rules from the knowledge base with the patient's data. The communication mechanism allows the system to show the results to the user as well as have input into the system. An expression language such as GELLO or CQL (Clinical Quality Language) is needed for expressing knowledge artefacts in a computable manner. For example: if a patient has diabetes mellitus, and if the last haemoglobin A1c test result was less than 7%, recommend re-testing if it has been over six months, but if the last test result was greater than or equal to 7%, then recommend re-testing if it has been over three months. The current focus of the HL7 CDS WG is to build on the Clinical Quality Language (CQL). The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that it plans to use CQL for the specification of Electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs). === Non-knowledge-based === CDSSs which do not use a knowledge base use a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning, which allow computers to learn from past experiences and/or find patterns in clinical data. This eliminates the need for writing rules and expert input. However, since systems based on machine learning cannot explain the reasons for their conclusions, most clinicians do not use them directly for diagnoses, reliability and accountability reasons. Nevertheless, they can be useful as post-diagnostic systems, for suggesting patterns for clinicians to look into in more depth. As of 2012, three types of non-knowledge-based systems are support-vector machines, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. Artificial neural networks use nodes and weighted connections between them to analyse the patterns found in patient data to derive associations between symptoms and a diagnosis. Genetic algorithms are based on simplified evolutionary processes using directed selection to achieve optimal CDSS results. The selection algorithms evaluate components of random sets of solutions to a problem. The solutions that come out on top are then recombined and mutated and run through the process again. This happens over and over until the proper solution is discovered. They are functionally similar to neural networks in that they are also "black boxes" that attempt to derive knowledge from patient data. Non-knowledge-based networks often focus on a narrow list of symptoms, such as symptoms for a single disease, as opposed to the knowledge-based approach, which covers the diagnosis of many diseases. An example of a non-knowledge-based CDSS is a web server developed using a support vector machine for the prediction of gestational diabetes in Ireland. == Regulations == === History, United States === The IOM had published a report in 1999, To Err is Human, which focused on the patient safety crisis in the United States, pointing to the incredibly high number of deaths. This statistic attracted great attention to the quality of patient care. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) promoted the usage of health information technology, including clinical decision support systems, to advance the quality of patient care. With the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), there was a push for widespread adoption of health information technology through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). Through these initiatives, more hospitals and clinics were integrating electronic medical records (EMRs) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) within their health information processing and storage. Despite the absence of laws, the CDSS vendors would almost certainly be viewed as having a legal duty of care to both the patients who may adversely be affected due to CDSS usage and the clinicians who may use the technology for patient care. However, duties of care legal regulations are not explicitly defined yet. With the enactment of the HITECH Act included in the ARRA, encouraging the adoption of health IT, more detailed case laws for CDSS and EMRs were still being defined by the Office of National Coordinator for Health Informati
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The Way (novel series)

The Way series is a trilogy of science fiction novels and one short story by American author Greg Bear published from 1985 to 1999. The first novel was Eon (1985), followed by a sequel, Eternity and a prequel, Legacy. It also includes The Way of All Ghosts, a short story that falls between Legacy and Eon. == Novels == === Eon === Eon chronicles the appearance and discovery of the Thistledown, and its subsequent effect on humanity. In the early 21st century, the United States and the USSR are on the verge of nuclear war. In that tense political climate, an asteroid appears out of near space after an unusual supernova and settles into an extremely elliptical orbit near Earth orbit. The two nations each try to claim this mysterious object, which appears to be a virtual duplicate of Juno. It is hollow and contains seven vast terraformed chambers. Two of the chambers contain cities long abandoned by human beings who seemed to come from Earth's future. The asteroid is called the Thistledown by its builders. A startling discovery is that it is bigger inside than outside. The seventh chamber appears to stretch into infinity. The human inhabitants of the Thistledown come from an alternate timeline, approximately 1000 years in the future. In their timeline, human civilization was nearly destroyed by the "Death", a calamitous World War involving nuclear weapons. The Death occurred at approximately the same time as the appearance of the Thistledown in the present time. Its presence threatens to cause the Death to occur on the current timeline as well. An expedition is sent down the seemingly infinite seventh chamber (The "Way", as it is known) where it encounters the descendants of humanity. The high technology of this civilization, known as the Hexamon, has control over genetic engineering, human augmentation, and matter itself. The Hexamon includes several alien species who have come to live with humanity's descendants. The Hexamon itself is at war with an alien race known as the Jarts from further down the corridor still. In 2007, CGSociety organised a "CG Challenge" based upon Eon === Eternity === Jarts, politics, and technology make up the second book in the series: Eternity. The Jart religion is based on the preservation of all data, which encompasses all life forms, past and present, and sending that data to the Jarts' future masters, their descendants. === Legacy === In the third book (a prequel, set in the time before Eon), Legacy, soldier Olmy ap Sennon is sent to spy on a group of dissidents who have used the spacetime tunnel of "the Way" (introduced in Eon) to colonize the alien world of Lamarckia, a planet with an ecosystem that learns from its changed environment in a way that resembles Lamarckian evolution. Its plants and animals turn out to actually be parts of continent-sized organisms. === "The Way of All Ghosts" === In the short story "The Way of All Ghosts" soldier Olmy ap Sennon is sent to close a lesion that formed out of a wayward gate into perfection. This story was published in 1999 in Far Horizons. == Fictional history of the Thistledown == Within the universe of The Way, the Thistledown is an asteroid starship built by hollowing out Juno and fitting it with mass-driver (rail gun) engines and thermonuclear drives. Inside the asteroid, seven giant "Chambers" are built, of which two host cities for the inhabitants, while others host machinery and recreation areas. The asteroid is prepared 500 years in the future, as told in Bear's novel Eon, and is engaged on a multi-generational journey to Epsilon Eridani, around which a habitable planet is known to circle. The journey is meant to take 60 years, as the ship can only maintain a velocity of 20% the speed of light. This limitation is removed after the technology of the Thistledown was improved to include inertial dampeners, allowing higher accelerations. Inhabiting the Thistledown are the best and brightest of Earth, who are quite diverse both culturally and politically. The Thistledown's society includes one transcendent genius, Konrad Korzenowski, whose preference for living in the Thistledown as compared with an outer universe, causes him to experiment with closed-geodesic space time in the Seventh Chamber, 20 years into the Thistledown's voyage. The results of his experiments are shattering in the extreme: He creates a unique pocket universe: The Way. == The Way == === Origin === The eponymous Way is an extension of the 7th Chamber, and was formed in the novels using the machinery of the 6th Chamber. This machinery is a selective inertial damper, developed by engineers within the Thistledown with twofold purpose—to permit the Thistledown to accelerate to the limit of its engines (up to 99% the speed of light) and to selectively dampen inertia within the vessel, e.g., water within waterways, high velocity train systems. The inertial dampening machinery within the 6th Chamber is anchored to the structure of the Thistledown, equally spaced around the chamber at the vertices of a regular heptagon. === Creation === At the creation, and rejoining of the Way to the Thistledown, the character Konrad Korzenowski and his engineers designed and 'built' the Way out of the in-folded geodesics of the inertial dampening field of the 6th Chamber machinery. This is described in the books by first considering the inertial dampening field: Within the Thistledown, the field envelops the asteroid, effectively isolating it from the Einsteinian Metrical Frame, permitting relative inertia to be ignored. The Thistledown was, at the time of activation, isolated from its continuum, but only selectively. Its matter and energy anchored it to its continuum and relative time, but its geometry and quantum entanglement had been strained by the inertial dampener, thus making it susceptible to superspace distortions, and therefore it could be affected by them negatively. Korzenowski, having been influenced by the earlier work of Vazquez on Earth, and in developing her work within the Thistledown, planned a radical extension of the inertial field of the 6th Chamber - effectively extending the field away to an infinite extent within the 7th Chamber. In order to do this effectively, he and his engineers modified a set of semi-sentient field calibration tools to build the first Clavicles. Unlike the field calibration tools from which they were descended, the Clavicles possessed the ability not only to manipulate the field, but extend it as an extension of the will of the operator. Already radical enough, Korzenowski and his team went further. By extending the field of the 6th Chamber from within the 7th Chamber of the Thistledown, they could then directly access what Vasquez had calculated within her own work—alternate world lines as non-gravity bent geodesics of superspace. Korzenowski thus 'felt' superspace within the 7th Chamber, selecting the infinite selection of possible alternate pocket universes accessible by the Clavicle to form, as a sheer act of will, the Way from his designs and his vision. The resulting structure was constructed, not of matter, but of previously in-folded superspace vectors now infinitely extended. (in the manner of Schwarzschild folded geometry, or of an asymptotic curve.) The Way was thus opened. The Way's geometry also gave rise to the Flaw - as superspace geometry of the field boundary was extended infinitely, so the folded geodesics of the field unfold in the geometric centre of the Way to form a singularity. This singularity, the Flaw, rests within the Way's plasma tube (which in turn is sustained by the Flaw). The Flaw 'produces' gravity by actively repulsing matter away from itself in an acceleration at the square of the distance away from itself. In addition, any object encircling the Flaw, and then exerting pressure against it, experiences this pressure as a translation force along the Flaw's length perpendicular to the direction of force. The motion thus induced is controllable by the angle at which an annular ring enclosure is pressed against the Flaw. The same spatial transform also can be used to turn tip turbines in order to generate electricity. The Flaw permits a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics, therefore defining the Way as a perpetual motion machine of the First Order, making energy out of nothing. === Early history === The Way, as formed, was described by Bear as being in vacuum and did not consist of matter within its infinite length. Due to extremely slight ambiguity involved in its creation, the synchronicity between time within the Way, and within the Thistledown, was not exact. Thus, the Engineers spend two decades working to correct these faults using the Clavicles to manipulate the junction between Way and Thistledown. During this period, ambition led Korzenowksi to use the clavicle to open the first exploratory gate within the way, leading to the universe of the Jarts. Though the gate to Jart world was closed, the advanced Jarts neve
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Google Tasks

Google Tasks is a task management application developed by Google and included with Google Workspace. Included initially as a feature in Gmail and Google Calendar, Google Tasks launched as a core product with a standalone app in 2018. It is available for Android and iOS, as well as in the right-hand side panel on Google Workspace apps on the web and in Google Calendar. == History and development == Google Tasks began as an integration within other apps in G Suite (now Google Workspace), allowing to-do items to be created in Calendar and Gmail. Upon graduating to a core service on June 28, 2018, Google Tasks launched as a dedicated mobile app in which tasks can be sorted into lists, managed, and completed. Google Tasks launched the ability to create tasks from Google Chat messages in 2022.
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Monkey and banana problem

The monkey and banana problem is a famous toy problem in artificial intelligence, particularly in logic programming and planning. It has been framed as: A monkey is in a room containing a box and a bunch of bananas. The bananas are hanging from the ceiling out of reach of the monkey. How can the monkey obtain the bananas? The situation is used as a toy problem for computer science and can be solved with an expert system such as CLIPS. The example set of rules that CLIPS provides is somewhat fragile, in that, naive changes to the rulebase that might seem to a human of average intelligence to make common sense can cause the engine to fail to get the monkey to reach the banana. Other examples exist using Rules Based System (RBS), including a project implemented in Python.
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Generative AI pornography

Generative AI pornography or simply AI pornography is a digitally created pornography produced through generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Unlike traditional pornography, which involves real actors and cameras, this content is synthesized entirely by AI algorithms. These algorithms, including generative adversarial networks (GANs) and text-to-image models, generate lifelike images, videos, or animations from textual descriptions or datasets. == Functions and production strategies == AI pornography platforms, beyond account creation and social media linking, primarily enable users to generate sexual images through feature selection or text prompting. Users can customize bodies, clothing, and sociodemographic traits, and browse categorized galleries of user‑generated content. Several sites also support short pornographic videos or GIFs and modification tools such as nudifiers, deepfakes, and facemorphing. Platforms often allow fine‑tuning of parameters such as settings, style, or theme, and provide prompt enhancers or suggestions to improve outputs. Users may edit generated images, refine prior prompts, modify others’ work, or upload personal material as a basis, with iterative and collaborative content creation. Some websites additionally host interactive “erobots,” customizable in real time for appearance, personality, memories, speech, and profession, enabling tailored sexual and non‑sexual interactions. Less common features include VR integration, AI porn games, audio or doodle prompts, and consensual replication of individuals with verification. == History == The use of generative AI in the adult industry began in the late 2010s, initially focusing on AI-generated art, music, and visual content. This trend accelerated in 2022 with Stability AI's release of Stable Diffusion (SD), an open-source text-to-image model that enables users to generate images, including NSFW content, from text prompts using the LAION-Aesthetics subset of the LAION-5B dataset. Despite Stability AI's warnings against sexual imagery, SD's public release led to dedicated communities exploring both artistic and explicit content, sparking ethical debates over open-access AI and its use in adult media. By 2020, AI tools had advanced to generate highly realistic adult content, amplifying calls for regulation. === AI-generated influencers === One application of generative AI technology is the creation of AI-generated influencers on platforms such as OnlyFans and Instagram. These AI personas interact with users in ways that can mimic real human engagement, offering an entirely synthetic but convincing experience. While popular among niche audiences, these virtual influencers have prompted discussions about authenticity, consent, and the blurring line between human and AI-generated content, especially in adult entertainment. === The growth of AI porn sites === By 2023, websites dedicated to AI-generated adult content had gained traction, catering to audiences seeking customizable experiences. These platforms allow users to create or view AI-generated pornography tailored to their preferences. These platforms enable users to create or view AI-generated adult content appealing to different preferences through prompts and tags, customizing body type, facial features, and art styles. Tags further refine the output, creating niche and diverse content. Many sites feature extensive image libraries and continuous content feeds, combining personalization with discovery and enhancing user engagement. AI porn sites, therefore, attract those seeking unique or niche experiences, sparking debates on creativity and the ethical boundaries of AI in adult media. == Ethical concerns and misuse == The growth of generative AI pornography has also attracted some cause for criticism. AI technology can be exploited to create non-consensual pornographic material, posing risks similar to those seen with deepfake revenge porn and AI-generated NCII (Non-Consensual Intimate Image). A 2023 analysis found that 98% of deepfake videos online are pornographic, with 99% of the victims being women. Some famous celebrities victims of deepfake include Scarlett Johansson, Taylor Swift, and Maisie Williams. OpenAI is exploring whether NSFW content, such as erotica, can be responsibly generated in age-appropriate contexts while maintaining its ban on deepfakes. This proposal has attracted criticism from child safety campaigners who argue it undermines OpenAI's mission to develop "safe and beneficial" AI. Additionally, the Internet Watch Foundation has raised concerns about AI being used to generate sexual abuse content involving children. === AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (AI Undress) === Generative AI have extensively been used to produce pornography images and videos of non-consenting individuals. 404 Media reported a particular AI generated porn bot on Telegram has more than 100,000 monthly users. Alibaba, the Chinese tech company, released an AI video generation model in 2025 called Wan 2.1, which was modified to produce non-consensual pornography. Several US states are taking actions against using deepfake apps and sharing them on the internet. In 2024, San Francisco filed a landmark lawsuit to shut down "undress" apps that allow users to generate non-consensual AI nude images, citing violations of state laws. The case aligns with California's recent legislation—SB 926, SB 942, and SB 981—championed by Senators Aisha Wahab and Josh Becker and signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. These bills aim to protect individuals from AI-generated explicit images by criminalizing non-consensual distribution, mandating disclosures, and empowering victims to report and remove harmful content from platforms. === Differences from deepfake pornography === While both generative AI pornography and deepfake pornography rely on synthetic media, they differ in their methods and ethical considerations. Deepfake pornography typically involves altering existing footage of real individuals, often without their consent, using AI to superimpose faces, undress said persons, or modify scenes. In contrast, generative AI pornography is created using algorithms, producing hyper-realistic content without the need to upload real pictures of people. Hany Farid, digital image analysis expert, also described the difference between "AI porn" and "deepfake porn." == Legality == The legality of generative AI pornography varies widely by jurisdiction and remains an evolving issue. In some countries, laws addressing digital impersonation, obscenity, or deepfake technologies may indirectly apply, particularly when AI-generated content involves the likeness of real individuals without consent. The absence of a physical performer further complicates traditional regulatory frameworks, which are often grounded in performer protection and distribution laws. In the United States, legal responses have primarily focused on non-consensual deepfakes and impersonation. Some states, such as Virginia, California, and Texas, have enacted legislation criminalising the creation or distribution of non-consensual explicit deepfake content. However, there is no comprehensive federal law addressing AI-generated pornography, leaving a patchwork of legal interpretations and enforcement standards across different jurisdictions. According to a 2023 report, South Korea accounts for approximately 53% of global deepfake pornography production. In September 2024, South Korea's National Assembly amended the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment of Sexual Crimes, introducing two significant reforms related to deepfake content. The first criminalises the possession, viewing, purchase, and storage of non-consensual deepfake material, with penalties of up to three years in prison or fines of up to 30 million won (approximately USD 20,000). The second reform specifically addresses the exploitation of minors, establishing that individuals who use deepfakes to threaten or blackmail minors face a minimum of three years' imprisonment, and at least five years if they coerce minors into unwanted acts. In England and Wales the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 has legislated against the creation, or the request for creation, of intimate images by nudifying software or websites of another person who has not consented to this. However as of January 2026 this has not yet been brought into force.
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