This week a Microsoft blog post announced they’re opening two new data centers in Cheyenne, “built with sustainable design and operations in mind, contributing to Microsoft’s commitment to being carbon negative.”

Our current and new datacenters will use adiabatic cooling, which uses outside air instead of water for cooling when temperatures are below 85 degrees Fahrenheit. This process uses less electricity and up to 90 percent less water than other water-based cooling systems. We’ve already invested over $500K in sustainability grants to local organizations that help preserve Wyoming’s natural environment including Crow Creek Revival that aims to promote, enhance, restore, and revitalize the region’s key watershed.

Building the data centers will also create 700 jobs “during peak construction,” Microsoft adds. And they’re also “investing in new water, sewer, and road infrastructure to create easier access to Bison Business Park, which will also support the growth of new businesses in Wyoming.”

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares more details:

“I appreciate Microsoft’s commitment to Wyoming and thank them for the benefits they have brought to multiple sectors of our economy,” said Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon. “The incentives that set this train in motion are working.”

Sergio Loureiro, VP of Core Operations for Microsoft’s Datacenters, suggested that Wyoming’s children are also benefiting from the incentives and data center tax exemptions: “We’ve partnered with the Wyoming Department of Education to host ongoing computer science training for more than 30 school districts across the state,” Loureiro explained, “impacting more than 60,000 K-12 students.

“We’re also collaborating with [Microsoft-backed] Code.org and the University of Wyoming to build the capacity of hundreds of K12 teachers to offer computer science education to thousands of students across the state. Microsoft’s TEALS high school computer science program has also partnered with six Wyoming high schools to build high-quality computer science education for approximately 500 students in Laramie, Gillette, Douglas, Casper, and Buffalo.”

Microsoft also says they’re investing over $350,000 to launch free WiFi at key community locations “helping more than 100,000 visitors and residents annually stay connected” — plus over a million dollars to launch three adult upskilling programs.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Builds New Green Data Centers in Wyoming, Invests in Wifi, Education, Roads

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed “a kind of genetic toolbox” for tiny one-centimeter jellfyfish, reports Phys.org. Specifically, the jellyfish “have been genetically modified so that their neurons individually glow with fluorescent light when activated.”

Because a jellyfish is transparent, researchers can then watch the glow of the animal’s neural activity as it behaves naturally. In other words, the team can read a jellyfish’s mind as it feeds, swims, evades predators, and more, in order to understand how the animal’s relatively simple brain coordinates its behaviors. A paper describing the new study appears in the journal Cell on November 24….

Rather than being centralized in one part of the body like our own brains, the jellyfish brain is diffused across the animal’s entire body like a net. The various body parts of a jellyfish can operate seemingly autonomously, without centralized control; for example, a jellyfish mouth removed surgically can carry on “eating” even without the rest of the animal’s body.

This decentralized body plan seems to be a highly successful evolutionary strategy, as jellyfish have persisted throughout the animal kingdom for hundreds of millions of years. But how does the decentralized jellyfish nervous system coordinate and orchestrate behaviors…? [T]hough the network of jellyfish neurons originally seemed diffuse and unstructured, the researchers found a surprising degree of organization that only became visible with their fluorescent system.
Ultimately the researchers say they’ve identified “patches” of neurons that work together, and they now want to study how various “modules” of neuron groups are coordinating.

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Source: Slashdot – How to Read a Jellyfish’s Mind

“For Halo fans who only care about multiplayer, ‘Halo Infinite’ is a free-to-play game,” writes the Washington Post. “But improbably, it’s messing up the free-to-play part.”

[I]ts progression system has been widely criticized for being too slow. You can only advance…and earn rewards by completing specific objectives for a few hundred experience points. Nothing else counts toward your progress besides a morsel of experience points earned just by playing a match, win or lose. Many of these challenges distract from the objective of winning matches, like when players are asked to use certain weapons or vehicles to get a kill. And since the current playlist system means you can’t choose what game type you’ll play, oftentimes you’ll see people running around using less-than-viable guns instead of, say, capturing the flag in a game of Capture the Flag…

Progression by itself is a tricky balancing act for developer 343 Industries, a studio that has never released a free-to-play game before. The issue is exacerbated by separating rewards out to be used only for specific armor sets. So for example, if you earn a blue color coating for armor, it’s applicable to only one type of armor. Currently, there are samurai-themed items on sale in the digital shop, including a sword belt for $15. The value of the sword is significantly lowered once you realize it can only be used along with the armor set unlocked by playing the event. There’s a surprising lack of cosmetic interoperability: If you want to wear the sword belt on your Mark VII armor, you’re out of luck. “Infinite” restricts armor customization to specific “core” armor sets, like the Mark VII or Mark V. Anything samurai-related can only be attached to the samurai armor set.

If all of that sounds confusing, it is, and it’s one of the main reasons the game’s monetization needs a rethink. Regardless of your opinion on the value of cosmetic-only rewards, 343 Industries had years of industry research to fall back on to implement these features better, communicate them more clearly and understand how challenge-only progression might divide the player base between people who focus only on completing challenges and those who’d rather work toward the objectives of a match.

All this criticism comes with a big caveat: The core gameplay of “Halo Infinite” has received almost universal praise. The game is undeniably fun for almost anyone who touches it. But the fun turns to frustration if players don’t feel sufficiently rewarded for the experience. Therein lies the great divide in the Halo audience. Longtime Halo players like myself play the games because, well, they feel fun to play; “Halo Infinite” succeeds on those merits. But players who are accustomed to earning cosmetic rewards in free-to-play games feel cheated when those rewards don’t come fast enough. That’s just how multiplayer games work these days….

“Halo Infinite” was very nearly a home run, but 343 Industries is struggling coming to grips with the free-to-play reality, and the audience is left confused and frustrated because of it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘Halo Infinite’: Fun to Play, But Newer Gamers Complain Its Rewards System Is Slow

“A team of researchers has finally created a long-sought locally testable code that can immediately betray whether it’s been corrupted…” reports Quanta magazine.

“Many thought local testability would never be achieved in its ideal form.”

Now, in a preprint released on November 8, the computer scientist Irit Dinur of the Weizmann Institute of Science and four mathematicians, Shai Evra, Ron Livne, Alex Lubotzky and Shahar Mozes, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have found it. “It’s one of the most remarkable phenomena that I know of in mathematics or computer science,” said Tom Gur of the University of Warwick. “It’s been the holy grail of an entire field.”

Their new technique transforms a message into a super-canary, an object that testifies to its health better than any other message yet known. Any corruption of significance that is buried anywhere in its superstructure becomes apparent from simple tests at a few spots. “This is not something that seems plausible,” said Madhu Sudan of Harvard University. “This result suddenly says you can do it.”

Most prior methods for encoding data relied on randomness in some form. But for local testability, randomness could not help. Instead, the researchers had to devise a highly nonrandom graph structure entirely new to mathematics, which they based their new method on. It is both a theoretical curiosity and a practical advance in making information as resilient as possible….

To get a sense of what their graph looks like, imagine observing it from the inside, standing on a single edge. They construct their graph such that every edge has a fixed number of squares attached. Therefore, from your vantage point you’d feel as if you were looking out from the spine of a booklet. However, from the other three sides of the booklet’s pages, you’d see the spines of new booklets branching from them as well. Booklets would keep branching out from each edge ad infinitum. “It’s impossible to visualize. That’s the whole point,” said Lubotzky. “That’s why it is so sophisticated….”

[A] test at one node can reveal information about errors from far away nodes. By making use of higher dimensions, the graph is ultimately connected in ways that go beyond what we typically even think of as connections… It establishes a new state of the art for error-correcting codes, and it also marks the first substantial payoff from bringing the mathematics of high-dimensional expanders to bear on codes…

Practical and theoretical applications should soon follow. Different forms of locally testable codes are now being used in decentralized finance, and an optimal version will allow even better decentralized tools.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Researchers Claim Locally-Testable-Code Breakthrough With Exotic Multi-Dimensional Graph