Cyber-Duck is a digital transformation agency founded in 2005 and based in Elstree, United Kingdom. The company specialises in user experience (UX), software development and digital optimisation. The company employs over 90 staff in the UK and Europe. It works with clients from the financial, pharmaceutical, sport, motoring and security sectors, among others. These include the Bank of England, Cancer Research UK, GOV.UK Verify partner CitizenSafe, The Commonwealth of Nations and Sport England. == History == Cyber-Duck was founded in 2005 by Danny Bluestone in his flat in Mill Hill, United Kingdom. After a few months, the firm moved into its first office in Borehamwood. Projects with Ogilvy, London Creative and Wisteria followed before Cyber-Duck moved to offices in Devonshire House, Borehamwood. In 2010, the firm was commissioned to develop a website for the European Commission in the UK. In 2011, the company moved to a self-contained premises in Elstree, Hertfordshire. Shortly afterward, Cyber-Duck was listed on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA in recognition of its substantial revenue growth over the previous five years. As the company grew, its expertise also broadened. This resulted in guest spots on several television shows. Cyber-Duck was featured in an episode of the Gadget Show in 2011, and Chief Production Officer Matt Gibson appeared on BBC Watchdog in 2013 to assist in researching websites and their checkout processes. The firm continued to attract business from companies in London, so the decision was made to open a new office in central London. The Farringdon office opened in 2015, and was followed by a rebrand. In 2016, Cyber-Duck went on to work with the Bank of England. Ahead of the launch of the new polymer £5 note, featuring Winston Churchill, the company was tasked with creating a user-friendly website to showcase the new banknote and promote public awareness. The success of the campaign led to further commissions, including 2017's website the New Ten and a redesign of the Bank of England's main website. The firm underwent significant growth in 2020, beginning working partnerships with Sport England and the College of Policing. During this time they also launched DevOps as a new service. In 2022, the Farringdon office closed and was relocated to a new office space in Holborn. The Laravel, Drupal and DevOps teams expanded, and Cyber-Duck became the lead Digital Agency for Worcester, Bosch Group. Several members of the team appeared on The Digital Society on Sky UK. == Awards and accreditations == Cyber-Duck is known for its focus on process accreditation as a driver of creativity. In 2011, the company obtained its first ISO 9241 accreditation in Human Centred Design for interactive systems. Two years later, Cyber-Duck obtained a further certification, the ISO 9001 for Quality Management Systems. It acquired another certification in 2016 with the ISO 27001 – the focus of this accreditation was Information Security Management. In 2022, Cyber-Duck gained the ISO 14001 certification in Environmental Management. Cyber-Duck's digital products have won numerous Wirehive 100, BIMA and Webby awards. Notably, the company's UX Companion, a free iOS and Android app that is a glossary of UX theories, featured in Usability Geek and Smashing Magazine. In 2021 they were awarded as one of the UK's 100 Best Small Companies to work for, and BIMA10 shortlisted for their work with Sport England and This Girl Can.
Desktop video
Desktop video refers to a phenomenon lasting from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s when the graphics capabilities of personal computers such as the Amiga, Macintosh II, and specially-upgraded IBM PC compatibles had advanced to the point where individuals and local broadcasters could use them for analog non-linear editing and vision mixing in video production. Despite the use of computers, desktop video should not be confused with digital video since the video data remained analog, and it uses items like a VCR and a camcorder to record the video. Full-screen, full-motion video's vast storage requirements meant that the promise of digital encoding would not be realized on desktop computers for at least another decade. == Description == There were multiple models of genlock cards available to synchronize the content; the Newtek Video Toaster was commonly used in Amiga in countries that used NTSC (PAL-M in Brazil), while PCs had Truevision and Matrox Illuminator cards and Mac systems had the SuperMac Video Spigot and Radius VideoVision cards. Apple later introduced the Macintosh Quadra 840AV and Centris 660AV systems to specifically address this market. Desktop video was a parallel development to desktop publishing and enabled many small production houses and local TV stations to produce their own original content for the first time. Along with the advent of public-access cable channels, desktop video meant that television advertising became affordable for local businesses such as retailers, restaurants, real estate agents, contractors and auto dealers. As with the phrase desktop publishing, use of the term died out as the technologies to which it referred become the norm for any kind of video production.
ICAD (software)
ICAD (Corporate history: ICAD, Inc., Concentra (name change at IPO in 1995), KTI (name change in 1998), Dassault Systèmes (purchase in 2001) () is a knowledge-based engineering (KBE) system that enables users to encode design knowledge using a semantic representation that can be evaluated for Parasolid output. ICAD has an open architecture that can utilize all the power and flexibility of the underlying language. KBE, as implemented via ICAD, received a lot of attention due to the remarkable results that appeared to take little effort. ICAD allowed one example of end-user computing that in a sense is unparalleled. Most ICAD developers were degreed engineers. Systems developed by ICAD users were non-trivial and consisted of highly complicated code. In the sense of end-user computing, ICAD was the first to allow the power of a domain tool to be in the hands of the user, at the same time being open to allow extensions as identified and defined by the domain expert or subject-matter expert (SME). A COE article looked at the resulting explosion of expectations (see AI winter), which were not sustainable. However, such a bubble burst does not diminish the existence of ability that would exist were expectations and use reasonable or properly managed. == History == The original implementation of ICAD was on a Lisp machine (Symbolics). Some of the principals involved with the development were Larry Rosenfeld, Avrum Belzer, Patrick M. O'Keefe, Philip Greenspun, and David F. Place. The time frame was 1984–85. ICAD started on special-purpose Symbolics Lisp hardware and was then ported to Unix when Common Lisp became portable to general-purpose workstations. The original domain for ICAD was mechanical design with many application successes. However, ICAD has found use in other domains, such as electrical design, shape modeling, etc. An example project could be wind tunnel design or the development of a support tool for aircraft multidisciplinary design. Further examples can be found in the presentations at the annual IIUG (International ICAD Users Group) that have been published in the KTI Vault (1999 through 2002). Boeing and Airbus used ICAD extensively to develop various components in the 1990s and early 21st century. As of 2003, ICAD was featured strongly in several areas as evidenced by the Vision & Strategy Product Vision and Strategy presentation. After 2003, ICAD use diminished. At the end of 2001, the KTI Company faced financial difficulties and laid off most of its best staff. They were eventually bought out by Dassault who effectively scuppered the ICAD product. See IIUG at COE, 2003 (first meeting due to Dassault by KTI) The ICAD system was very expensive, relatively, and was in the price range of high-end systems. Market dynamics couldn't support this as there may not have been sufficient differentiating factors between ICAD and the lower-end systems (or the promises from Dassault). KTI was absorbed by Dassault Systèmes and ICAD is no longer considered the go-forward tool for knowledge-based engineering (KBE) applications by that company. Dassault Systèmes is promoting a suite of tools oriented around version 5 of their popular CATIA CAD application, with Knowledgeware the replacement for ICAD. As of 2005, things were still a bit unclear. ICAD 8.3 was delivered. The recent COE Aerospace Conference had a discussion about the futures of KBE. One issue involves the stacking of 'meta' issues within a computer model. How this is resolved, whether by more icons or the availability of an external language, remains to be seen. The Genworks GDL product (including kernel technology from the Gendl Project) is the nearest functional equivalent to ICAD currently available. == Particulars == ICAD provided a declarative language (IDL) using New Flavors (never converted to Common Lisp Object System (CLOS)) that supported a mechanism for relating parts (defpart) via a hierarchical set of relationships. Technically, the ICAD Defpart was a Lisp macro; the ICAD defpart list was a set of generic classes that can be instantiated with specific properties depending upon what was represented. This defpart list was extendible via composited parts that represented domain entities. Along with the part-subpart relations, ICAD supported generic relations via the object modeling abilities of Lisp. Example applications of ICAD range from a small collection of defparts that represents a part or component to a larger collection that represents an assembly. In terms of power, an ICAD system, when fully specified, can generate thousands of instances of parts on a major assembly design. One example of an application driving thousands of instances of parts is that of an aircraft wing – where fastener type and placement may number in the thousands, each instance requiring evaluation of several factors driving the design parameters. == Futures (KBE, etc.) == One role for ICAD may be serving as the defining prototype for KBE which would require that we know more about what occurred the past 15 years (much information is tied up behind corporate firewalls and under proprietary walls). With the rise of functional programming languages (an example is Haskell) in the markets, perhaps some of the power attributable to Lisp may be replicated.
Existential risk from artificial intelligence
Existential risk from artificial intelligence, or AI x-risk, refers to the idea that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) could lead to human extinction or an irreversible global catastrophe. One argument for the validity of this concern and the importance of this risk references how human beings dominate other species because the human brain possesses distinctive capabilities other animals lack. If AI were to surpass human intelligence and become superintelligent, it might become uncontrollable. Just as the fate of the mountain gorilla depends on human goodwill, the fate of humanity could depend on the actions of a future machine superintelligence. Experts disagree on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) can achieve the capabilities needed for human extinction. Debates center on AGI's technical feasibility, the speed of self-improvement, and the effectiveness of alignment strategies. Concerns about superintelligence have been voiced by researchers including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, and Alan Turing, and AI company CEOs such as Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Elon Musk (xAI). In 2022, a survey of AI researchers with a 17% response rate found that the majority believed there is a 10 percent or greater chance that human inability to control AI will cause an existential catastrophe. In 2023, hundreds of AI experts and other notable figures signed a statement declaring, "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war". Following increased concern over AI risks, government leaders such as United Kingdom prime minister Rishi Sunak and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for an increased focus on global AI regulation. In 2025, hundreds of public figures including AI experts, five Nobel Prize laureates, and former senior US national security officials such as Michael Mullen and Susan Rice signed a statement calling for a ban on the development of superintelligence. Two sources of concern stem from the problems of AI control and alignment. Controlling a superintelligent machine or instilling it with human-compatible values may be difficult. Many researchers believe that a superintelligent machine would likely resist attempts to disable it or change its goals as that would prevent it from accomplishing its present goals. It would be extremely challenging to align a superintelligence with the full breadth of significant human values and constraints. In contrast, skeptics such as computer scientist Yann LeCun argue that superintelligent machines will have no desire for self-preservation. A June 2025 study showed that in some circumstances, models may break laws and disobey direct commands to prevent shutdown or replacement, even at the cost of human lives. Researchers warn that an "intelligence explosion"—a rapid, recursive cycle of AI self-improvement—could outpace human oversight and infrastructure, leaving no opportunity to implement safety measures. In this scenario, an AI more intelligent than its creators would recursively improve itself at an exponentially increasing rate, too quickly for its handlers or society at large to control. Empirically, examples like AlphaZero, which taught itself to play Go and quickly surpassed human ability, show that domain-specific AI systems can sometimes progress from subhuman to superhuman ability very quickly, although such machine learning systems do not recursively improve their fundamental architecture. == History == One of the earliest authors to express serious concern that highly advanced machines might pose existential risks to humanity was the novelist Samuel Butler, who wrote in his 1863 essay Darwin among the Machines: The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. In 1951, foundational computer scientist Alan Turing wrote the article "Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory", in which he proposed that artificial general intelligences would likely "take control" of the world as they became more intelligent than human beings: Let us now assume, for the sake of argument, that [intelligent] machines are a genuine possibility, and look at the consequences of constructing them... There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler's Erewhon. In 1965, I. J. Good originated the concept now known as an "intelligence explosion" and said the risks were underappreciated: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion', and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. It is curious that this point is made so seldom outside of science fiction. It is sometimes worthwhile to take science fiction seriously. Scholars such as Marvin Minsky and I. J. Good himself occasionally expressed concern that a superintelligence could seize control, but issued no call to action. In 2000, computer scientist and Sun co-founder Bill Joy penned an influential essay, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", identifying superintelligent robots as a high-tech danger to human survival, alongside nanotechnology and engineered bioplagues. Nick Bostrom published Superintelligence in 2014, which presented his arguments that superintelligence poses an existential threat. By 2015, public figures such as physicists Stephen Hawking and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, computer scientists Stuart J. Russell and Roman Yampolskiy, and entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Bill Gates were expressing concern about the risks of superintelligence. Also in 2015, the Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence highlighted the "great potential of AI" and encouraged more research on how to make it robust and beneficial. In April 2016, the journal Nature warned: "Machines and robots that outperform humans across the board could self-improve beyond our control—and their interests might not align with ours". In 2020, Brian Christian published The Alignment Problem, which details the history of progress on AI alignment up to that time. In March 2023, key figures in AI, such as Musk, signed a letter from the Future of Life Institute calling a halt to advanced AI training until it could be properly regulated. In May 2023, the Center for AI Safety released a statement signed by numerous experts in AI safety and the AI existential risk that read: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. A 2025 open letter by the Future of Life Institute, whose signers include five Nobel Prize laureates, reads: We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in. == Potential AI capabilities == === General Intelligence === Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is typically defined as a system that performs at least as well as humans in most or all intellectual tasks. A 2022 survey of AI researchers found that 90% of respondents expected AGI would be achieved in the next 100 years, and half expected the same by 2061. In May 2023, some researchers dismissed existential risks from AGI as "science fiction" based on their high confidence that AGI would not be created anytime soon. But in August 2023, a survey of 2,778 AI researchers found that most believed that AGI would be achieved by 2040. Breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have led some researchers to reassess their expectations. Notably, Geoffrey Hinton said in 2023 that he recently changed his estimate from "20 to 50 years before we have general purpose A.I." to "20 years or less". === Superintelligence === In contrast with AGI, Bostrom defines a superintelligence as "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest", including scientific creativity, strategic planning, and social skills. He argues that a superintelligence can outmaneuver humans anytime its goals conflict with humans'. It may choose to hide its true intent until humanity cannot stop it. Bostrom writes that in order to be safe for
Mira Murati
Ermira "Mira" Murati (born 16 December 1988) is an Albanian-American business executive. She launched an AI startup called Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025. Previously she was the chief technology officer of OpenAI, and a senior product manager at Tesla. == Early life and education == Murati was born on 16 December 1988 in Vlorë, Albania. She is fluent in Italian. At age 16, she won a United World Colleges (UWC) scholarship to study at Pearson College on Vancouver Island in Canada, from which she graduated in 2007 with an International Baccalaureate. After Pearson, she went to the United States to pursue further studies through a dual-degree program, earning a Bachelor of Arts from Colby College in 2011, and a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering in 2012. == Career == === Early career === Murati interned in 2011 as a summer analyst at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, Japan. She then briefly worked for Zodiac Aerospace as an intern before joining the electric car company Tesla in 2013 as a product manager on the Model X. From 2016 to 2018, she worked for the augmented reality start-up Leap Motion (now Ultraleap). === OpenAI === In 2018, she joined OpenAI as the VP of Applied AI and partnerships. She became chief technology officer (CTO) in May 2022. She led OpenAI's work on ChatGPT, Dall-E, Codex and Sora, while overseeing its research, product and safety teams. She oversaw technical advancements and direction of OpenAI's various projects, including the development of advanced AI models and tools. Murati worked on several of OpenAI's notable products, such as the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) series of language models. Commenting about the potential loss of creative jobs to AI, Murati said that "maybe [the jobs] shouldn’t have been there in the first place". In October 2023, Murati was ranked 57th on Fortune's list of "The 100 Most Powerful Women in Business of 2023". In November 2023, Murati became interim chief executive officer of OpenAI following the removal of Sam Altman from the job. She had collaborated with Ilya Sutskever, whose 52-page memo outlining concerns about Altman relied heavily on screenshots and information she provided, which contributed to the board's decision to oust him. Murati was replaced by Emmett Shear three days later, who left when Altman was reinstated five days later. Following these events, Murati returned to her role as CTO. In June 2024, Dartmouth College awarded Murati an honorary Doctor of Science for having "democratized technology and advanced a better, safer world for us all". In September 2024, Murati announced that she was stepping down as CTO to allow her the opportunity to "do my own exploration". This move came amid a wider executive exodus as OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew and a vice president of research, Barret Zoph, also announced their departures soon after. === Thinking Machines Lab === In February 2025, Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab, a new public benefit corporation aiming "to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable". She was reported to have hired "a team of about 30 leading researchers and engineers from competitors including Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI." People involved with the startup include OpenAI cofounder John Schulman, and advisors Alec Radford and Bob McGrew. The following month, Bloomberg reported that the company had reached an estimated valuation of $9 billion, with an "average founder stake value" of $1.4 billion. In April 2025, Thinking Machines Lab reportedly aimed for a $2 billion seed round (requiring a minimum investment of $50 million). The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included participation from the government of Albania, valuing the company at $12 billion. Thinking Machines Lab follows a governance structure wherein Mira Murati holds a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability. In October 2025, Thinking Machines Lab announced its first product, Tinker, a tool used to create custom frontier AI models. == Publications == Murati, Ermira (Spring 2022). "Language & Coding Creativity". Daedalus. 151 (2). Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS): 156–167. doi:10.1162/daed_a_01907. Retrieved 25 September 2024.
Film recorder
A film recorder is a graphical output device for transferring images to photographic film from a digital source. In a typical film recorder, an image is passed from a host computer to a mechanism to expose film through a variety of methods, historically by direct photography of a high-resolution cathode-ray tube (CRT) display. The exposed film can then be developed using conventional developing techniques, and displayed with a slide or motion picture projector. The use of film recorders predates the current use of digital projectors, which eliminate the time and cost involved in the intermediate step of transferring computer images to film stock, instead directly displaying the image signal from a computer. Motion picture film scanners are the opposite of film recorders, copying content from film stock to a computer system. Film recorders can be thought of as modern versions of kinescopes. == Design == === Operation === All film recorders typically work in the same manner. The image is fed from a host computer as a raster stream over a digital interface. A film recorder exposes film through various mechanisms; flying spot (early recorders); photographing a high resolution video monitor; electron beam recorder (Sony HDVS); a CRT scanning dot (Celco); focused beam of light from a light valve technology (LVT) recorder; a scanning laser beam (Arrilaser); or recently, full-frame LCD array chips. For color image recording on a CRT film recorder, the red, green, and blue channels are sequentially displayed on a single gray scale CRT, and exposed to the same piece of film as a multiple exposure through a filter of the appropriate color. This approach yields better resolution and color quality than possible with a tri-phosphor color CRT. The three filters are usually mounted on a motor-driven wheel. The filter wheel, as well as the camera's shutter, aperture, and film motion mechanism are usually controlled by the recorder's electronics and/or the driving software. CRT film recorders are further divided into analog and digital types. The analog film recorder uses the native video signal from the computer, while the digital type uses a separate display board in the computer to produce a digital signal for a display in the recorder. Digital CRT recorders provide a higher resolution at a higher cost compared to analog recorders due to the additional specialized hardware. Typical resolutions for digital recorders were quoted as 2K and 4K, referring to 2048×1366 and 4096×2732 pixels, respectively, while analog recorders provided a resolution of 640×428 pixels in comparison. Higher-quality LVT film recorders use a focused beam of light to write the image directly onto a film loaded spinning drum, one pixel at a time. In one example, the light valve was a liquid-crystal shutter, the light beam was steered with a lens, and text was printed using a pre-cut optical mask. The LVT will record pixel beyond grain. Some machines can burn 120-res or 120 lines per millimeter. The LVT is basically a reverse drum scanner. The exposed film is developed and printed by regular photographic chemical processing. === Formats === Film recorders are available for a variety of film types and formats. The 35 mm negative film and transparencies are popular because they can be processed by any photo shop. Single-image 4×5 film and 8×10 are often used for high-quality, large format printing. Some models have detachable film holders to handle multiple formats with the same camera or with Polaroid backs to provide on-site review of output before exposing film. == Uses == Film recorders are used in digital printing to generate master negatives for offset and other bulk printing processes. For preview, archiving, and small-volume reproduction, film recorders have been rendered obsolete by modern printers that produce photographic-quality hardcopies directly on plain paper. They are also used to produce the master copies of movies that use computer animation or other special effects based on digital image processing. However, most cinemas nowadays use Digital Cinema Packages on hard drives instead of film stock. === Computer graphics === Film recorders were among the earliest computer graphics output devices; for example, the IBM 740 CRT Recorder was announced in 1954. Film recorders were also commonly used to produce slides for slide projectors; but this need is now largely met by video projectors that project images directly from a computer to a screen. The terms "slide" and "slide deck" are still commonly used in presentation programs. === Current uses === Currently, film recorders are primarily used in the motion picture film-out process for the ever increasing amount of digital intermediate work being done. Although significant advances in large venue video projection alleviates the need to output to film, there remains a deadlock between the motion picture studios and theater owners over who should pay for the cost of these very costly projection systems. This, combined with the increase in international and independent film production, will keep the demand for film recording steady for at least a decade. == Key manufacturers == Traditional film recorder manufacturers have all but vanished from the scene or have evolved their product lines to cater to the motion picture industry. Dicomed was one such early provider of digital color film recorders. Polaroid, Management Graphics, Inc, MacDonald-Detwiler, Information International, Inc., and Agfa were other producers of film recorders. Arri is the only current major manufacturer of film recorders. Kodak Lightning I film recorder. One of the first laser recorders. Needed an engineering staff to set up. Kodak Lightning II film recorder used both gas and diode laser to record on to film. The last LVT machines produced by Kodak / Durst-Dice stopped production in 2002. There are no LVT film recorders currently being produced. LVT Saturn 1010 uses a LED exposure (RGB) to 8"x10" film at 1000-3000ppi. LUX Laser Cinema Recorder from Autologic/Information International in Thousand Oaks, California. Sales end in March 2000. Used on the 1997 film “Titanic”. Arri produces the Arrilaser line of laser-based motion picture film recorders. MGI produced the Solitaire line of CRT-based motion picture film recorders. Matrix, originally ImaPRO, a branch of Agfa Division, produced the QCR line of CRT-based motion picture film recorders. CCG, formerly Agfa film recorders, has been a steady manufacturer of film recorders based in Germany. In 2004 CCG introduced Definity, a motion picture film recorder utilizing LCD technology. In 2010 CCG introduced the first full LED LCD film recorder as a new step in film recording. Cinevator was made by Cinevation AS, in Drammen, Norway. The Cinevator was a real-time digital film recorder. It could record IN, IP and prints with and without sound Oxberry produced the Model 3100 film recorder camera system, with interchangeable pin-registered movements (shuttles) for 35 mm (full frame/Silent, 1.33:1) and 16 mm (regular 16, "2R"), and others have adapted the Oxberry movements for CinemaScope, 1.85:1, 1.75:1, 1.66:1, as well as Academy/Sound (1.37:1) in 35 mm and Super-16 in 16 mm ("1R"). For instance, the "Solitaire" and numerous others employed the Oxberry 3100 camera system. == History == Before video tape recorders or VTRs were invented, TV shows were either broadcast live or recorded to film for later showing, using the kinescope process. In 1967, CBS Laboratories introduced the Electronic Video Recording format, which used video and telecined-to-video film sources, which were then recorded with an electron-beam recorder at CBS' EVR mastering plant at the time to 35mm film stock in a rank of 4 strips on the film, which was then slit down to 4 8.75 mm (0.344 in) film copies, for playback in an EVR player. All types of CRT recorders were (and still are) used for film recording. Some early examples used for computer-output recording were the 1954 IBM 740 CRT Recorder, and the 1962 Stromberg-Carlson SC-4020, the latter using a Charactron CRT for text and vector graphic output to either 16 mm motion picture film, 16 mm microfilm, or hard-copy paper output. Later 1970 and 80s-era recording to B&W (and color, with 3 separate exposures for red, green, and blue)) 16 mm film was done with an EBR (Electron Beam Recorder), the most prominent examples made by 3M), for both video and COM (Computer Output Microfilm) applications. Image Transform in Universal City, California used specially modified 3M EBR film recorders that could perform color film-out recording on 16 mm by exposing three 16 mm frames in a row (one red, one green and one blue). The film was then printed to color 16 mm or 35 mm film. The video fed to the recorder could either be NTSC, PAL or SECAM. Later, Image Transform used specially modified VTRs to record 24 frame for their "Image Vision" system. The modified 1 inch type B videotape VTRs would record
OpenAI Five
OpenAI Five is a computer program by OpenAI that plays the five-on-five video game Dota 2. Its first public appearance occurred in 2017, where it was demonstrated in a live one-on-one game against the professional player Dendi, who lost to it. The following year, the system had advanced to the point of performing as a full team of five, and began playing against and showing the capability to defeat professional teams. By choosing a game as complex as Dota 2 to study machine learning, OpenAI thought they could more accurately capture the unpredictability and continuity seen in the real world, thus constructing more general problem-solving systems. The algorithms and code used by OpenAI Five were eventually borrowed by another neural network in development by the company, one which controlled a physical robotic hand. OpenAI Five has been compared to other similar cases of artificial intelligence (AI) playing against and defeating humans, such as AlphaStar in the video game StarCraft II, AlphaGo in the board game Go, Deep Blue in chess, and Watson on the television game show Jeopardy!. == History == Development on the algorithms used for the bots began in November 2016. OpenAI decided to use Dota 2, a competitive five-on-five video game, as a base due to it being popular on the live streaming platform Twitch, having native support for Linux, and had an application programming interface (API) available. Before becoming a team of five, the first public demonstration occurred at The International 2017 in August, the annual premiere championship tournament for the game, where Dendi, a Ukrainian professional player, lost against an OpenAI bot in a live one-on-one matchup. After the match, CTO Greg Brockman explained that the bot had learned by playing against itself for two weeks of real time, and that the learning software was a step in the direction of creating software that can handle complex tasks "like being a surgeon". OpenAI used a methodology called reinforcement learning, as the bots learn over time by playing against itself hundreds of times a day for months, in which they are rewarded for actions such as killing an enemy and destroying towers. By June 2018, the ability of the bots expanded to play together as a full team of five and were able to defeat teams of amateur and semi-professional players. At The International 2018, OpenAI Five played in two games against professional teams, one against the Brazilian-based paiN Gaming and the other against an all-star team of former Chinese players. Although the bots lost both matches, OpenAI still considered it a successful venture, stating that playing against some of the best players in Dota 2 allowed them to analyze and adjust their algorithms for future games. The bots' final public demonstration occurred in April 2019, where they won a best-of-three series against The International 2018 champions OG at a live event in San Francisco. A four-day online event to play against the bots, open to the public, occurred the same month. There, the bots played in 42,729 public games, winning 99.4% of those games. == Architecture == Each OpenAI Five bot is a neural network containing a single layer with a 4096-unit LSTM that observes the current game state extracted from the Dota developer's API. The neural network conducts actions via numerous possible action heads (no human data involved), and every head has meaning. For instance, the number of ticks to delay an action, what action to select – the X or Y coordinate of this action in a grid around the unit. In addition, action heads are computed independently. The AI system observes the world as a list of 20,000 numbers and takes an action by conducting a list of eight enumeration values. Also, it selects different actions and targets to understand how to encode every action and observe the world. OpenAI Five has been developed as a general-purpose reinforcement learning training system on the "Rapid" infrastructure. Rapid consists of two layers: it spins up thousands of machines and helps them 'talk' to each other and a second layer runs software. By 2018, OpenAI Five had played around 180 years worth of games in reinforcement learning running on 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores, using Proximal Policy Optimization, a policy gradient method. == Comparisons with other game AI systems == Prior to OpenAI Five, other AI versus human experiments and systems have been successfully used before, such as Jeopardy! with Watson, chess with Deep Blue, and Go with AlphaGo. In comparison with other games that have used AI systems to play against human players, Dota 2 differs as explained below: Long run view: The bots run at 30 frames per second for an average match time of 45 minutes, which results in 80,000 ticks per game. OpenAI Five observes every fourth frame, generating 20,000 moves. By comparison, chess usually ends before 40 moves, while Go ends before 150 moves. Partially observed state of the game: Players and their allies can only see the map directly around them. The rest of it is covered in a fog of war which hides enemies units and their movements. Thus, playing Dota 2 requires making inferences based on this incomplete data, as well as predicting what their opponent could be doing at the same time. By comparison, Chess and Go are "full-information games", as they do not hide elements from the opposing player. Continuous action space: Each playable character in a Dota 2 game, known as a hero, can take dozens of actions that target either another unit or a position. The OpenAI Five developers allow the space into 170,000 possible actions per hero. Without counting the perpetual aspects of the game, there are an average of ~1,000 valid actions each tick. By comparison, the average number of actions in chess is 35 and 250 in Go. Continuous observation space: Dota 2 is played on a large map with ten heroes, five on each team, along with dozens of buildings and non-player character (NPC) units. The OpenAI system observes the state of a game through developers' bot API, as 20,000 numbers that constitute all information a human is allowed to get access to. A chess board is represented as about 70 lists, whereas a Go board has about 400 enumerations. == Reception == OpenAI Five have received acknowledgement from the AI, tech, and video game community at large. Microsoft founder Bill Gates called it a "big deal", as their victories "required teamwork and collaboration". Chess champion Garry Kasparov, who lost against the Deep Blue AI in 1997, stated that despite their losing performance at The International 2018, the bots would eventually "get there, and sooner than expected". In a conversation with MIT Technology Review, AI experts also considered OpenAI Five system as a significant achievement, as they noted that Dota 2 was an "extremely complicated game", so even beating non-professional players was impressive. PC Gamer wrote that their wins against professional players was a significant event in machine learning. In contrast, Motherboard wrote that the victory was "basically cheating" due to the simplified hero pools on both sides, as well as the fact that bots were given direct access to the API, as opposed to using computer vision to interpret pixels on the screen. The Verge wrote that the bots were evidence that the company's approach to reinforcement learning and its general philosophy about AI was "yielding milestones". In 2019, DeepMind unveiled a similar bot for StarCraft II, AlphaStar. Like OpenAI Five, AlphaStar used reinforcement learning and self-play. The Verge reported that "the goal with this type of AI research is not just to crush humans in various games just to prove it can be done. Instead, it's to prove that — with enough time, effort, and resources — sophisticated AI software can best humans at virtually any competitive cognitive challenge, be it a board game or a modern video game." They added that the DeepMind and OpenAI victories were also a testament to the power of certain uses of reinforcement learning. It was OpenAI's hope that the technology could have applications outside of the digital realm. In 2018, they were able to reuse the same reinforcement learning algorithms and training code from OpenAI Five for Dactyl, a human-like robot hand with a neural network built to manipulate physical objects. In 2019, Dactyl solved the Rubik's Cube.