Palworld is an online co-op multiplayer open-world survival crafting game developed by Pocket Pair. Take a look at the latest gameplay trailer for Incineram Noct, an evil Pal who targets young Pals and takes them back to its lair. Palworld is available now for Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, and PC.

Palworld - Incineram Noct Gameplay Trailer - IGN

With Palworld&#x27;s upcoming PvP Arena update later this year, the developers have the opportunity to include an interesting new base feature.

Palworld's PvP Arena is a Great Blueprint for a New Base Feature

AltWorld started off with a vision to create the next generation user-generated content platform by combining the best of 3D immersive experiences across genres. AltWorld is developing a metaverse ecosystem for gaming that will redefine the experience of millions of Indian gamers who deserve more from their games. We are fortunate to be backed by renowned institutional investors and some of the best angel investors across diverse CXO and operatorship backgrounds. Join us to create the future of metaverse in India & serve the next generation of internet users with the future of technology solutions. AltWorld is led by a team of ex product and tech leaders from renowned consumer internet companies. We are always looking for people who are excited to solve large-scale problems with 10X better experience solutions and who are driven by the purpose of excellence.

AltWorld

ToolTalk: Benchmarking Tool-Augmented LLMs in Conversational AI

Authors:
(1) Nicholas Farn, Microsoft Corporation {Microsoft Corporation {nifarn@microsoft.com};
(2) Richard Shin, Microsoft Corporation {eush@microsoft.com}. Table of Links Abstract and Intro Dataset Design Evaluation Methodology Experiments and Analysis Related Work Conclusion, Reproducibility, and References A. Complete list of tools B. Scenario Prompt C. Unrealistic Queries D. Nuances comparing prior work 5 RELATED WORK In Section 1, we described our desired criteria for evaluating tool-using LLM-based assistants: using dialogue to specify intents requiring multi-step tool invocations, and actions rather than only retrieving information, for a fully automated evaluation not requiring human judgement over the outputs of the system under test. Table 5 summarizes how other work about evaluating tool-using LLMs compares along these factors. We describe the related work in greater detail below. Tool-augmented LLMs are also known as tool-augmented learning, tool LLMs, tool-learning, augmented language models (ALMs), or tool manipulation with LLMs (Xu et al., 2023; Mialon et al., 2023; Qin et al., 2023a). Development in this area consists of improving LLM performance in traditional tasks by giving them access to tools such as a calculator or search engine (Lu et al., 2023a; Yao et al., 2022b; Paranjape et al., 2023; Hao et al., 2023). It can also include applying LLMs to traditional automation tasks such as embodied robotics or browsing the web (Liu et al., 2023b; Deng et al., 2023; Yao et al., 2022a; Liang et al., 2023), dubbed “LLM-as-agent” by AgentBench (Liu et al., 2023a). Traditional tasks that tool-augmented LLMs have been applied to include question answering such as ScienceQA (Saikh et al., 2022) or HotPotQA (Yang et al., 2018), mathematical reasoning (Cobbe et al., 2021; Lu et al., 2023b; Qiao et al., 2023), multilingual translation and QA (Lewis et al., 2020; Scarton et al., 2019), open-domain QA (Zhu et al., 2021), and commonsense QA (Talmor et al., 2019) to name a few. These tasks are useful for demonstrating the benefits of augmenting LLMs with tool usage, but fail to fully distinguish how much LLMs rely on internal knowledge vs good usage of tools (Zhuang et al., 2023). They also fail to incorporate the use of tools that affect the external world since they are unnecessary for those tasks. Common agent benchmarks that have been applied to tool-augmented LLMs include WebShop (Yao et al., 2022a), Tabletop (Liang et al., 2023), Mind2Web (Deng et al., 2023), and ALFWorld (Shridhar et al., 2020). Additionally, AgentBench compiles Mind2Web, WebShop, and ALFWorld into a unified benchmark while adding additional agent environments such as interacting with a bash terminal, creating SQL commands to query a database, interacting with a knowledge graph, digital card game simulations, and lateral thinking puzzles (Liu et al., 2023a). ToolBench does something similar by compiling Tabletop and Webshop while introducing a variety of other tasks consisting of predicting a single API call. These benchmarks are useful for evaluating the effectiveness of tool-augmented LLMs in a variety of autonomous situations. However, none of them test tool-augmented LLMs in a conversational setting. Furthermore, tasks in these benchmarks consist of issuing a single utterance which an agent then tries to accomplish without any further human interaction. This is in contrast to ToolTalk, where a conversation will consist of multiple utterances with multiple intermediary tasks. Past works have also created datasets for evaluating tool-augmented LLM-based assistants. Examples include ToolLLM (Qin et al., 2023b), API-Bank (Li et al., 2023), TPTU (Ruan et al., 2023), Gorilla (Patil et al., 2023), RestGPT (Song et al., 2023), GPT4Tools (Yang et al., 2023), and ToolAlpaca (Tang et al., 2023) among others. Unfortunately, many of these datasets require manual inspection of the outputs of the assistant under test to perform a complete evaluation. A lot of them also have unrealistic queries, and do not reflect questions or intents humans are likely to say in real life.[4] Many of them are also simple, where the solution requires one or two tool calls (Li et al., 2023; Ruan et al., 2023; Yang et al., 2023; Tang et al., 2023). Except for Li et al. (2023), these consider users’ utterances in isolation rather than as part of a conversation or dialogue. There also exists a corpus of work on task-oriented dialogue systems. This area of research is focused on collecting realistic, task-oriented dialogue for the tasks of intent classification and slot filling (Larson & Leach, 2022). Some popular task-oriented dialogue datasets include MultiWoz (Budzianowski et al., 2018), Taskmaster and TicketTalk (Byrne et al., 2019; 2020), and STAR and STARv2 (Mosig et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2022). The goals of creating realistic dialogue and evaluating on intent classification and slot filling have some overlap with ToolTalk. However, taskoriented dialogue datasets usually only predict a single intent per user utterance, do not simulate plugins or tools, and do not provide execution feedback for predicted tool calls. TicketTalk (Byrne et al., 2020) is notable in that it does provide a simulation of a movie booking API, however this API does not provide execution feedback and is not rigorously defined allowing for loose arguments like “here” or “now”. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. [4] We include a few examples from various papers in Appendix C. Authors: (1) Nicholas Farn, Microsoft Corporation {Microsoft Corporation {nifarn@microsoft.com}; (2) Richard Shin, Microsoft Corporation {eush@microsoft.com}. Authors: Authors: (1) Nicholas Farn, Microsoft Corporation {Microsoft Corporation {nifarn@microsoft.com}; (2) Richard Shin, Microsoft Corporation {eush@microsoft.com}. Table of Links Abstract and Intro Abstract and Intro Dataset Design Dataset Design Evaluation Methodology Evaluation Methodology Experiments and Analysis Experiments and Analysis Related Work Related Work Conclusion, Reproducibility, and References Conclusion, Reproducibility, and References A. Complete list of tools A. Complete list of tools B. Scenario Prompt B. Scenario Prompt C. Unrealistic Queries C. Unrealistic Queries D. Nuances comparing prior work D. Nuances comparing prior work 5 RELATED WORK In Section 1, we described our desired criteria for evaluating tool-using LLM-based assistants: using dialogue to specify intents requiring multi-step tool invocations, and actions rather than only retrieving information, for a fully automated evaluation not requiring human judgement over the outputs of the system under test. Table 5 summarizes how other work about evaluating tool-using LLMs compares along these factors. We describe the related work in greater detail below. Tool-augmented LLMs are also known as tool-augmented learning, tool LLMs, tool-learning, augmented language models (ALMs), or tool manipulation with LLMs (Xu et al., 2023; Mialon et al., 2023; Qin et al., 2023a). Development in this area consists of improving LLM performance in traditional tasks by giving them access to tools such as a calculator or search engine (Lu et al., 2023a; Yao et al., 2022b; Paranjape et al., 2023; Hao et al., 2023). It can also include applying LLMs to traditional automation tasks such as embodied robotics or browsing the web (Liu et al., 2023b; Deng et al., 2023; Yao et al., 2022a; Liang et al., 2023), dubbed “LLM-as-agent” by AgentBench (Liu et al., 2023a). Traditional tasks that tool-augmented LLMs have been applied to include question answering such as ScienceQA (Saikh et al., 2022) or HotPotQA (Yang et al., 2018), mathematical reasoning (Cobbe et al., 2021; Lu et al., 2023b; Qiao et al., 2023), multilingual translation and QA (Lewis et al., 2020; Scarton et al., 2019), open-domain QA (Zhu et al., 2021), and commonsense QA (Talmor et al., 2019) to name a few. These tasks are useful for demonstrating the benefits of augmenting LLMs with tool usage, but fail to fully distinguish how much LLMs rely on internal knowledge vs good usage of tools (Zhuang et al., 2023). They also fail to incorporate the use of tools that affect the external world since they are unnecessary for those tasks. Common agent benchmarks that have been applied to tool-augmented LLMs include WebShop (Yao et al., 2022a), Tabletop (Liang et al., 2023), Mind2Web (Deng et al., 2023), and ALFWorld (Shridhar et al., 2020). Additionally, AgentBench compiles Mind2Web, WebShop, and ALFWorld into a unified benchmark while adding additional agent environments such as interacting with a bash terminal, creating SQL commands to query a database, interacting with a knowledge graph, digital card game simulations, and lateral thinking puzzles (Liu et al., 2023a). ToolBench does something similar by compiling Tabletop and Webshop while introducing a variety of other tasks consisting of predicting a single API call. These benchmarks are useful for evaluating the effectiveness of tool-augmented LLMs in a variety of autonomous situations. However, none of them test tool-augmented LLMs in a conversational setting. Furthermore, tasks in these benchmarks consist of issuing a single utterance which an agent then tries to accomplish without any further human interaction. This is in contrast to ToolTalk, where a conversation will consist of multiple utterances with multiple intermediary tasks. Past works have also created datasets for evaluating tool-augmented LLM-based assistants. Examples include ToolLLM (Qin et al., 2023b), API-Bank (Li et al., 2023), TPTU (Ruan et al., 2023), Gorilla (Patil et al., 2023), RestGPT (Song et al., 2023), GPT4Tools (Yang et al., 2023), and ToolAlpaca (Tang et al., 2023) among others. Unfortunately, many of these datasets require manual inspection of the outputs of the assistant under test to perform a complete evaluation. A lot of them also have unrealistic queries, and do not reflect questions or intents humans are likely to say in real life.[4] Many of them are also simple, where the solution requires one or two tool calls (Li et al., 2023; Ruan et al., 2023; Yang et al., 2023; Tang et al., 2023). Except for Li et al. (2023), these consider users’ utterances in isolation rather than as part of a conversation or dialogue. There also exists a corpus of work on task-oriented dialogue systems. This area of research is focused on collecting realistic, task-oriented dialogue for the tasks of intent classification and slot filling (Larson & Leach, 2022). Some popular task-oriented dialogue datasets include MultiWoz (Budzianowski et al., 2018), Taskmaster and TicketTalk (Byrne et al., 2019; 2020), and STAR and STARv2 (Mosig et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2022). The goals of creating realistic dialogue and evaluating on intent classification and slot filling have some overlap with ToolTalk. However, taskoriented dialogue datasets usually only predict a single intent per user utterance, do not simulate plugins or tools, and do not provide execution feedback for predicted tool calls. TicketTalk (Byrne et al., 2020) is notable in that it does provide a simulation of a movie booking API, however this API does not provide execution feedback and is not rigorously defined allowing for loose arguments like “here” or “now”. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv [4] We include a few examples from various papers in Appendix C.

Understanding Related Research on Tool-Augmented Learning

Urban planning has never been so critical as smart cities re-imagine themselves after the shock of the pandemic. Many people believe that younger people have a natural tendancy to move to the big city lights after they finish college. However, a thought provoking 2022 report by Harvard's Ben Sprung-Keyser, Nathaniel Hendren and Sonya Porter found that 80% of young adults migrate less than 100 miles from were they grew up. One key takeaway from the study found that big changes in average wages doesn't lead to mass movement. This indicates that job opportunities in bigger cities are not a motivation for people to move into those cities. If movement of people benefits society and provides more opportunity for the general public the question becomes how to reduce barriers to mobility? An analysis of this report on Vox suggested developing a series of "place-based policies" which is an interesting idea. Furthermore, a city could add smart policy incentives that would encourage various forms of people movement and enrich the communities within cities. Cities are stretching beyond traditional boundaries and becoming more complex with new infrastructure, housing capacity issues and now a hybrid working model that is leaving many wondering where the future of work will end up down the road. A combination of emerging technology that is becoming smarter by the day is offering unique ways for public services to interact with urban environments. Everything from energy consumption to transportation management is being transformed as we tackle urban problems with innovative solutions. Using NFT’s to monitor, manage and incentivise individual behavior is one way that blockchain technology is adding to the smart city of the future. Let’s focus on three ways that NFTs could be integrated into some of our most important public services. Deconstructing ownership with Property NFTs The world of property ownership and real estate has long been ripe for disruption, and Non-Fungible Tokens could be just the solution the industry needs. NFTs are a form of digital asset that use blockchain technology to provide unique, verifiable ownership of an asset or piece of content. While NFTs have primarily been associated with the world of art and collectibles, there is growing interest in their potential applications in the property market. At their core, NFTs provide a secure and transparent way to track ownership of assets, which is a critical component of the property market. By using NFTs to represent property ownership, buyers and sellers can avoid many of the headaches associated with traditional property transactions. NFTs can be used to represent property ownership, simplifying the buying and selling process. Additionally, NFTs could be used instead of heavy weighted rental agreements. This would give a secure way to track the rental market of a city. NFTs can also be used for accurately monitoring, forecasting and manpower needed for property management. NFTs may be causing a stir in the artworld but these broader use cases could help to solve everyday administration headaches for public representatives. Streamlining ownership in the complicated world of real estate is a major way to transform a vital sector in society. Carbon credit NFTs to incentivize less footprints From engaging the community in environmental degradation issues to helping reduce overall city carbon emissions, NFTs can be used as a tool for tracking and verifying carbon credits. Carbon credits are often used by organizations to offset their carbon footprint but what about the individuals living in a city who are passionate about seeing the greener side of the city come alive. The issue with traditional carbon credits is that it can be difficult to verify that the investment actually resulted in a reduction in carbon emissions. Now, by using NFTs as carbon credits, companies and individuals can ensure that their investment is transparent. Each NFT can represent a certain amount of carbon emissions that have been offset, and the blockchain can be used to track the ownership and movement of each NFT. You could even go a step further and attach those credits to local emissions thereby supporting the local economy. For example, a reforestation project that is funded by NFTs can create jobs for local communities. This not only helps reduce carbon emissions but also supports the economic development of the area. Overall, using NFTs as carbon credits and emissions trading can help smart cities to achieve their sustainability goals and build more resilient, equitable, and livable communities. NFTs used as access points Another way to consider the utility of NFTs within smarter cities is by using them to access public services in several ways. The transparency, storage and self custody could eventually saving taxpayers millions with more effective management of under utilized services. NFTs could be used as proof of eligibility and provide personalized services. Imagine walking up to a bus stop or a train and presenting your NFT as proof of identity. This NFT would contain all the necessary information, including your name, address, and any other relevant data required for the service. Streamlining access points for public services could save the government millions and give more control to city center dwellers. They could also allow urban planners to more accurately assess the needs of the public. For example, where access points for disabled people are failing and what would make is easier for them to receive support they need. NFTs could also help to highlight old services or services that are no longer being used by the public, which could save taxpayers money. By tracking usage patterns over time, city planners could identify services that are no longer in demand or are being underutilized. This information could be used to make data-driven decisions about whether to continue funding these services, or to redirect resources to more pressing needs. In traditional monitoring methods, it can be difficult to obtain accurate usage data for every service. Some services may be overlooked or receive less attention due to limited resources, and therefore, it may be challenging to obtain a comprehensive understanding of which services are being used and which are not. Moreover, NFT access cards could also be used for loyalty programs and rewards for using public services. For instance, every time you use a public service, you could receive an NFT that contains rewards or discounts for future services. This would encourage people to use public transportation more often and also spend time in the city, which would ultimately regenerate the community. The data collected via these NFTs would make for fascinating research and allow for more informed policy decisions with regards to urban planning of our cities in the future. . Conclusion Matching smart technologies with the economic, societal and environmental needs of a city can be a daunting challenge. However, harnessing emerging blockchain technology to facilitate positive living spaces is worth investing in for the future. For urban planners it will be crucial to develop a strategy that provides the right public services to the cohort that needs them at the right time. Without the right individual incentives in place engaging citizens in a broader smart city vision will be impossible to implement. For an innovative urban planning recipe of the future, take individual NFTs as incentive models for good behavior, mix in advanced IoT that provides feedback on the management of urban infrastructure, add a dash of smart energy solutions and stir in all of the stakeholders required to make up to date decisions. Also published here .

3 Ways that NFTs could be used in Smart Cities of the Future

This epic interview with myself, the DisCO CAT, was originally published in edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty. Go buy three copies now and enjoy this of my purr-tastic diatribes. Radical Friends – Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts exclusive director’s cut I can haz DAOs: An Interview with the DisCO CAT Or, All Your DAOs Are Belong to Us: The DisCO CAT Speaks DisCOs (Distributed Cooperative Organizations ) are the punky/pinko cousins of DAOs. They’ve totally pwned the latter by coopting the only non-human creatures on this planet that have successfully : CATS! colonized the internet Who made you and why (including ecologies of institutional, political, community actors, elders?) I’m the ! You know about ?  That’s where hoomans help maintain shared values through legal structures, to share the use and management of shared land-space? Well, I do the same: I’m a digital trust that upholds and maintains the agreed-on values of DisCOs. And unlike my boring normie DAO-cousin who’s always banging on about ‘trustlessness’, I help the hoomans trust each other while working together, and to figure out messy questions about value, fairness and power on their own. I’m here to help (and to totally wreck your curtains). DisCO CAT! “CAT” stands for “Community Algorithmic Trust” Community Land Trusts actually The people at they made me. But it was , I swear! DisCO.coop think autopoiesis Whose interests do you serve? As a CAT, I obviously serve my own interests, which include ingratiating myself to hoomans so I can get fluffier, haha. Just kidding: I’m there to help the hoomans in the DisCOs practice of . OK, I hear you asking, “what’s ‘Value Sovereignty'”? So, it starts with the Commons, which is a term that describes a system of shared resources managed by a community according to their own agreed-upon rules. Value Sovereignty is how a commons manages its relationship to the market, making sure that it sticks to its ideals and values and doesn’t get swallowed up by mercantile hijinks! Long story short, a group that operates as a commons that also has some market activity can implement Value Sovereignty to keep itself from being subsumed by the dominant market logics. Unlike my DAO cousins, I can’t, don’t and won’t autoexecute Smart Contracts in lieu of the hoomans (that is SO Skynet, !) I encourage them to discuss and decide on how value is distributed before disbursing it. I’m the cyberfeline projection of the hooman values of any given DisCO. I get away with this by cuddling in federated collectives of no more than 20 people, where building real trust is my pajamas! Value Sovereignty jeez Karen If your ethereal form was to manifest into something what would you look like? Furry, four legged and salty?  I think we’ve already crossed that bridge, to be frank. How do you enable new approaches to decision making, resource distribution and cooperation between disparate people and/or agendas? By keeping it tiny, like me! First, let me explain a word that comes up a lot, like hairballs. “Trustless” is an invented term that is used to describe how allow people to exchange things (currencies, tokens – you know, play money, etc.) without knowing or trusting one another, relying on how the tech creates a non-paper trail of records that can’t be altered by the hoomans. Some of the blockchained hoomans are very proud of the trustless thing, and promote that it takes care of allllll of their problems, ha. blockchain and other similar tech But here’s how I see it: there’s a spectrum from trustless to trustworthy, and I’m interested in developing the latter by forming federated clusters of coops who, get this, ! This DisCO cat knows everything about , the and . The hoomans have to do the work of creating and maintaining meaningful relationships among themselves first, while enabling for more ephemeral interactions at higher levels of complexity. Anyway, as a cat I support prioritizing relationships over routines and structures, in that order. Think litters, colonies and . WE ARE LEGION — well, we’re working on it… build trust among themselves provisioning commons feminist economics world-wide feline conspiracies Who or what do you look after and how do you serve their needs? HOOMANS! Forget that slanderous myth that cats are not affectionate. DisCO CATS love our hoomans! We help them discuss and enact new notions of value beyond the normcore structures replicated in . the blokechain https://vimeo.com/376668856?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=908646&embedable=true How would people describe your personality? Focused, salty, spicy, and surprisingly cooperative. What is your superpower? Kind of a toss-up between social engineering and shedding. Does your family have any rituals that aid you in your productivity? I thrive on cattention while also being mostly invisible, so I revel in the care work my hoomans perform on my behalf. I try to make it worth their while by leaving small “presents” that I find in the garden, even if I know they’d really prefer functional code and some neato data visualizations. I am and inexhaustible, so most of my productivity happens while think I’m sleeping. It’s totes ! In fact, I take the rituals the hoomans have made their secret pacts about, and I make it easy for them to remember and enact them regularly! half cat-half machine you wu-wei How do you view the art world? From under the sofa. No, seriously, the art world is a lot like me, isn’t it?  Power, luxury and elegance on one hand, and scraping for survival while reflecting the worlds’ many visions of itself on the other ( ) rolls more catnip… What message do you have for the artworld? More sashimi at openings, please, and keep it up with the critical self-examination. Personally, I like it when art surprises me, so it’s good when the artworld finds ways to break out of stagnant habits and let others in – including me, the invisible digital glue that holds this family together. Gad, I sound like my mother… What does success look like in your artworld? Right, ok. If my art is cooperation, let’s go there. Coops worldwide have an annual financial turnover similar to the market cap of MAGAF (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook).  DisCOs want to federate coops so they can go from economic alternative to economic ! Is that art? Hells yeah.  Talk about creative (feline) destruction! I want lots of CATs to screech together and make a big stink. Hang that on your wall, Zuck. counterpower How do you reward, incentivise and punish your user family? Here’s a radical concept: rather than auto-executing smart contracts to divvy up rewards or zap you with penalties, I show the hoomans the real score — how much they’ve contributed to three : value streams Productive market work Pro-bono commons-creating work Care and reproductive work I help them to see these values that markets externalize and blockchains often turn a blind eye towards, and then the hoomans discuss it in their ridiculous voices, and make decisions which I then help carry out. As long as they keep stroking me until I’m ready to bite them, I’m here to facilitate the , not to trap hoomans into unbreachable, runaway, algorithmic hellscapes, although this does depend on my treats input. act of commoning What is software built on? Power, corruption and lies. . Anyway, most software is built on the fundamental values of its benefactors, the hoo-hoo-hoomans with the money. Great album Oh, you ? You geek! Ok, I’ll play: I have a three tier architecture. Instead of a virtual sandbox I was birthed in a cat litter with a crumbling old server! Now I have made the jump to lightweight DLT solutions that don’t require a bazillion megawatts, and using our meaowstic vocab: . Data is crunched and I only “mark my territory”, hehe, in public blockchains . I am bringing that most elusive word to the blockchain world: sufficiency! See our forthcoming (yes, pink!) for more. really want to know like Bonfire Value Flows when necessary PinkPaper I’ll let you in on a secret though: Most hoomans ! They care more about what the software does for them, and sexy interfaces. This is why the DisCO Deck (where I live) is being built with state-of-the-art UX, accompanied by a slew of accessible material on why this software matters! You wouldn’t expect less from a style icon like me! don’t care what software things are built on If you could choose one thing to be improved about yourself, what would it be? I wish I was a little taller. Oh, and I want lots of copycats to infiltrate cooperatives all over the world; I want to be the occupy-coops cat. . Tell me who you know Image Credits Lead image: on Andreas M Unsplash Cat memes: Teh Interwebz

All Your DAOs Are Belong to Us – The DisCO CAT Speaks

Although a lot of subjects in the field of software development reached a common understanding, one continues to be a matter of controversy: software development, is it craft or science? Craft or science… you might wonder why anyone would care. Well, probably many people don’t care, but, as we will discuss shortly, your opinion on this has consequences on how you approach software. Let’s first look at some quotes of people who do care. Already in the mid 70’s Donald Knuth felt the need to dedicate an article to this discussion, after publishing a series of books titled (1). He concluded the following: The Art of Computer Programming We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. (2) That seems to be a clear statement, but the same article mentions the quest ongoing for several years already to make programming a discipline of science. Another article, roughly twenty years later, shows that this goal was still not reached: Today’s software developer is somewhere between a craftsman and an engineer (3) It seems these authors desire software development to be a science, but keep finding the software engineer is not there yet (3). Also in 2003, three decades after Knuth’s conclusion, an article of Pyritz ...argues in favor of craftsmanship without ignoring best practices. (4) The existence of Software Craftsmanship conferences (5) in recent years and still more articles appearing on this debate (6) show the discussion still did not come to a conclusion. Considering this limited review of literature, we see software programming requires craftsmanship, at least according to some people. But what if software development would be a science? Science has properties that are very desirable for software development. First of all, results from science are reproducible (7), under the same circumstances we expect the same outcome. Furthermore, science has high quality standards on documentation and publishing, giving insight in validity of the results. Additionally, the scientific method is a widely accepted methodology (8), helping practitioners to cooperate and perform. Abstraction methods like generalization and induction allow reuse of existing scientific results, applying it to a broader scope or different field than it was originally created for. Reproducibility, documentation, validation, methodology and reuse are desirable and important aspects of software development as well. The desirable properties of science most likely explain the ambition of software development to classify as a science. Despite this comprehensible ambition, our limited review of literature above shows the current state of software development methodologies does not qualify as such. Although the properties of science are quite natural for a computer system, that does not make them properties of software development as well. This, because software development comprehends not only the actual computing but is also dependent on the process of requirements engineering, organizational changes, implementation plans, business cases and adoption of the new system, which all involve a lot of human factors. Despite the fact that humans are considered the most rational beings on the planet, they are so in a very limited, biased, unenlightened and emotional way (9). These human factors impair the properties of science for software development, making us ...probably feel more comfortable describing the software development process as an "art" or a "craft", possibly bordering on "witchcraft." (6) So we have concluded software development is not a science but a craft. In line with that, would that automatically make it a form of art? To answer that question we will have to examine whether software development complies to the criteria of art. However, defining art appears to be rather complicated. Despite thousands of years of debating, mankind still did not manage to come to a conclusion on the definition of art. It is even argued whether such a definition is possible at all (10). Nevertheless, the different ideas on what makes art art give us sufficient guidance to say something about the artistic value of software. Attempts to define art can be grouped in several categories (10), which we will now shortly discuss. The category of institutional definitions define art based on the work of art being produced in a context of art. This context is referred to as the artworld. With this type of definition the judgement of the people belonging to the artworld determine what is considered a work of art. Another category is based on the work of art having an art-historical relation to some earlier artwork, hence this category is named historical definitions. Historical definitions often have difficulties in qualifying radically different new types of art, as no relation to former artworks exists for these types. Next to these two conventionalist types of definitions, traditional definitions exist as well. These focus more on the functions or intended functions of the work. Most of the traditional definitions come down to the requirement that a work of art has some aesthetic properties. Meaning it should have something to do with beauty or the perception of beauty. This brief and high-level overview of definitions of art shows how complicated it is to define art. However, it does provide several aspects to take into account when determining whether something is a work of art. Relating the aspects derived from definitions of art to software development, we find interesting similarities. First, we see a software development community exists. This community has its own views, culture and principles and could be considered an artworld. In this artworld of software development some programs are acceptable and others are not, which is corresponding to an institutional definition of art. But also traditional definitions of art, requiring aesthetic properties, allow defining software as art, provided there is some beauty or perception of beauty in the software code. The large amount of hits when searching the Internet for 'beautiful code' demonstrates beauty is definitely considered a property of software. Therefore, we conclude that beautiful software code is a form of art. A lot of software products end up unused due to not building the right thing or not building the thing right (11). For these software products developers have been working hard, spending precious time and energy on building the product, meeting deadlines and doing overtime to finish this software product, which in the end will never be used. Luckily, we now know it still had a purpose as they produced entities of art, if only aesthetics were taken into account. So whatever failure-prone project you are upto, just make sure you write beautiful code! Lead image by cottonbro@Pexels References Knuth, D. AddisonWesley, Reading, Mass., 1969 (second printing) and 1969 , The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1. Fundamental Algorithms and Volume 2. Seminumerical Algorithms, Knuth, D., , CACM, 1974 Computer programming is an art Collins, J., , Electrical Communication, 2: 181-189, 1994 Craft or science - Software engineering evolution B. Pyritz, , Bell Labs Technical Journal, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 101-104, 2003 Craftsmanship versus engineering: Computer programming — An art or a science? , retrieved 23 November 2020 https://scna.softwarecraftsmanship.org/ , retrieved 24 November 2020 https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1130886/The-Software-Development-Process-Science-Engineeri , retrieved 24 November 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility , retrieved 27 November 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method , retrieved 1 December 2020 https://medium.com/@aditiathaley/how-rational-are-humans-as-decision-makers-c1fa2dc22561 , , retrieved 27 November 2020 The Definition of Art https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/ Swords, S., , Atlas Computer Systems Limited, 2017 Why software projects fail

Software Development still seems a craft, but beautiful coding makes it an art.

2020 has seen economic contraction on an unprecedented scale. Collectively we have been plunged into unchartered waters by events outside of our control with little insight as to how to right the ship. The one thing that economists and experts across the board seem to be unanimous on regarding this crisis is that it will serve to accelerate processes that were taking shape before things went haywire. In a recent centered on China and how the coronavirus pandemic was likely to reshape the Chinese economy moving forward, consulting firm Mckinsey & Company concluded that events that were set to play out over the course of the next several years have been put on a fast track and are happening in front of our eyes. As a result, when the virus does subside, it is unlikely that, economically speaking, there will be a return to pre-virus norms. report Mckinsey identified 5 trends that have accelerated during the pandemic that range from new consumers coming of age and playing a more active role in the economy, to focus shifting from the global market to competitive national stages. The report was centered on China, but the trends identified are taking place on a global scale, and while these things were happening prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, as could be seen in the influx of advertisers and consumers to streaming platforms popular with younger people and the geopolitical fractions that had flared up with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, they were not expected to take precedence so quickly. The pandemic has seen them flourish. The number one trend, however, identified by Mckinsey — and just about every other analyst looking at the market — as emerging as the most significant vector of financial development in the post-Covid reality is digital transformation. The digital transformation is happening across entire economies right now. From the same report, according to surveys, about 55 percent of Chinese consumers are likely to continue buying their groceries online after the peak of the crisis. That’s a remarkable figure. Granted, China was already at the forefront of digital advancement, so the rest of the world may not be at the same level, but it is not far behind. With the economy in a full bore digital transformation, the sector that many have circled as most likely to benefit from the shift is that of cryptocurrency and blockchain. With China testing out its own digital yuan cryptocurrency, and what is being termed a ‘DeFi renaissance” happening in the Ethereum community and beyond, there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that crypto is set for big things in the post-Covid future. The NFT Economy If acceleration is the rule of the day, of all the sectors in the blockchain industry, the non-fungible token (NFT) economy is perhaps most poised to take center stage in DeFi and make significant inroads into mainstream channels. NFTs can be understood as cryptocollectibles, each provably unique and suitable for a number of different applications like digital art, gaming pieces and virtual reality property. Back in 2017, the market cap for NFT projects was measured at just over $30 million. 2018 was a huge down year for the crypto industry as a whole, yet, despite contractions across the industry, the NFT market cap rose by 480%, weighing in at $180 million. The following year the market cap rose steadily, ending up around $220 million. The factors driving the consistent growth here are varied. The first major breakthrough for an NFT project came when CryptoKitties exploded onto the scene back in late 2017. While it had been theorized about earlier, CryptoKitties was one of the first projects that brought blockchain technology to the gaming sphere. The premise of the game is that each player can own their unique cryptokitty, which is locked into the blockchain as an NFT and can appreciate or depreciate in value over time. The game quickly gained popularity, and a great deal of it too, threatening at one point to overwhelm the Ethereum platform after taking up over 10% of the platform’s network traffic. The runaway popularity inspired a swath of other similar games, some of which rose to prominence in their own right, like Blockchain Cuties. The most appealing aspect of CryptoKitties was the extra dimension it added to the gaming experience. Gaming is one of the most profitable sectors of the entertainment industry, but its existing operational paradigm is no longer suited to our evolving economic realities. Somewhere around $140 billion is spent by consumers on gaming products each year, and it all goes to the development companies. If just a fraction of that were diverted into assets that were then owned and controlled by players and consumers, a dynamic new sphere of activity would be added to that of gaming. The Artworld Goes Digital CryptoKitties showed that that was possible to the tune of millions of dollars from in game purchases and subsequent outside investments. While the furor over the game has subsided, at one point, the game had over 1.5 million users responsible for over $40 million dollars worth of transactions on the platform. In the platform’s heyday, individual cryptokitties sold for over the equivalent of $300,000 and transactions were covered with awe by mainstream media outlets, including the . New York Times As evidenced by the piece in the Times, which covered the first-ever live auction of cryptocurrency-themed art, while CryptoKitties was a gaming experience, the NFT’s involved transcended the framework of the game and caused waves in the art world. The first crypto art auction was for an artwork called “Celestial Cyber Dimension,” which was created by Guilherme Twardowski and contained digital and analog elements along with an embedded cryptokitty. The piece, which prior to the auction had been displayed in a Christie’s auction house next to a Basquiat, ended up going for $140,000. Now, some years later, the intersection of NFTs and the artworld is one of the most fascinating fields in terms of development and investment activity. With the prices of Ethereum and ERC tokens in recent days, and Forbes that Ethereum has started its “DeFi moonshot,” there is a great deal of excitement in the industry and much of it is centered around NFTs. rising rapidly declaring Speaking with , the entrepreneurs behind the digital art platform, Ivan Starinin and Alexander Salnikov, shared that, the way they see it, this is only the beginning of the NFT boom. Starinin, pointing to the potential of the token technology as the reason for its increasing appeal, said, “This type of a token is not yet fully integrated into the blockchain finance system, however, it is extremely useful. For example, you can enclose a whole portfolio, consisting of ERC20 tokens, in a single NFT, which can operate like a stock investment fund. Using Rarible, it is also easy to invest in several works of art at once. In addition, NFT tokens are one option for adding liquidity to illiquid assets. And there are many more use cases that make the NFT market very promising moving forward.” Insider Monkey Rarible Some of that vast potential can be seen on the Rarible platform itself, where, in addition to the token art, users who make transactions on the platform are rewarded with RARI, the platform’s governance token. With RARI, users can vote on potential changes to the platform and take part in the curation and moderation processes. This kind of democratic, user-based approach is a far cry from the fustiness of the traditional art world, and a showcase of how this technology can reshape power structures. While the Rarible platform is one of the older digital art platforms out there, it has been joined by others, flush with institutional money and looking to take advantage of the influx of new users and funds. Among the newcomers are Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss who opened up their own NFT art marketplace, featuring works by Jon Burgerman and Kenny Scharf, in March of this year. With traditional avenues of art collection and investment suffering due to the difficulties brought on by the Covid-19 outbreak, the stars, it seems, have aligned for the NFT world. If industry insiders like Starinin are to be believed, we are currently only scratching the surface in terms of what this technology can be used for. Given the current economic situation, and the openness and ease of access of the industry, if the DeFi renaissance continues to progress, the repercussions may be felt way beyond the blockchain space.

As Traditional Economies Freeze, NFTs and DeFi Show Promise

Around half a year ago I decided to start decorating my new house. Before getting started, I did lots of research on a variety of different topics relating to interior decoration, such as how to choose a consistent color scheme, which measurements to make and how to make them, and how to choose the right furniture. However, my preparations made me realize that no matter how well prepared you are, you're always going to run into many unexpected challenges. Before rushing to the furniture store, I listed all the different pieces of furniture that I wanted to place in my living room, including a sofa, tea table, potted plants, dining table, and carpet, and determined the expected dimensions, colors, and styles of these various items of furniture. However, when I finally got to the furniture store, the dizzying variety of choices had me confused, and I found it very difficult to imagine how the different choices of furniture would actually look like in actual living room. At that moment a thought came to my mind: wouldn't it be great if there was an app that allows users to upload images of their home and then freely select different furniture products to see how they'll look like in their home? Such an app would surely save users wishing to decorate their home lots of time and unnecessary trouble, and reduce the risks of users being dissatisfied with the final decoration result. That's when the idea of developing an app by myself came to my mind. My initial idea was to design an app that people could use to help them quickly satisfy their home decoration needs by allowing them see what furniture would look like in their homes. The basic way the app works is that users first upload one or multiple images of a room they want to decorate, and then set a reference parameter, such as the distance between the floor and the ceiling. Armed with this information, the app would then automatically calculate the parameters of other areas in the room. Then, users can upload images of furniture they like into a virtual shopping cart. When uploading such images, users need to specify the dimensions of the furniture. From the editing screen, users can drag and drop furniture from the shopping cart onto the image of the room to preview the effect. But then a problem arises: images of furniture dragged and dropped into the room look pasted on and do not blend naturally with their surroundings. By a stroke of luck, I happened to discover when looking for a solution for the aforementioned problem. This development kit provides the ability to integrate virtual objects realistically into the real world, which is exactly what my app needs. With its plane detection capability, my app will be able to detect the real planes in a home and allow users to place virtual furniture based on these planes; and with its hit test capability, users can interact with virtual furniture to change their position and orientation in a natural manner. HMS Core AR Engine Next, I'd like to briefly introduce the two capabilities this development kit offers. AR Engine tracks the illumination, planes, images, objects, surfaces, and other environmental information, to allow apps to integrate virtual objects into the physical world and look and behave like they would if they were real. Its plane detection capability identifies feature points in groups on horizontal and vertical planes, as well as the boundaries of the planes, ensuring that your app can place virtual objects on them. In addition, the kit continuously tracks the location and orientation of devices relative to their surrounding environment, and establishes a unified geometric space between the virtual world and the physical world. The kit uses its hit test capability to map a point of interest that users tap on the screen to a point of interest in the real environment, from where a ray will be emitted pointing to the location of the device camera, and return the intersecting point between the ray and the plane. In this way, users can interact with any virtual object on their device screen. Functions and Features Plane detection: Both horizontal and vertical planes are supported. Accuracy: The margin of error is around 2.5 cm when the target plane is 1 m away from the camera. Texture recognition delay: < 1s Supports polygon fitting and plane merging. Development Procedure (Plane Detection) Create a object. This example demonstrates how to use the world AR scenario of AR Engine. WorldActivity Public class WorldActivity extends BaseActivity{
Protected void onCreate (Bundle saveInstanceState) {
Initialize DisplayRotationManager.
  mDisplayRotationManager = new DisplayRotationManager(this);
Initialize WorldRenderManager.
     mWorldRenderManager = new WorldRenderManager(this,this);
}
// Create a gesture processor.
 Private void initGestureDetector(){
mGestureDetector = new GestureDetector(this,new GestureDetector.SimpleOnGestureListener()){
  }
 }
 mSurfaceView.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener()){
  public Boolean onTouch(View v,MotionEvent event){
   return mGestureDetector.onTouchEvent(event);
  }
 }
// Create ARWorldTrackingConfig in the onResume lifecycle.
 protected void onResume(){
  mArSession = new ARSession(this.getApplicationContext());
  mConfig = new ARWorldTrackingConfig(mArSession);
  …
}
// Initialize a refresh configuration class.
private void refreshConfig(int lightingMode){
// Set the focus.
 mConfig.setFocusMode(ARConfigBase.FocusMode.AUTO_FOCUS);
 mArSession.configure(mConfig);
}
} 2) Initialize the class, which manages rendering related to world scenarios, including label rendering and virtual object rendering. WorldRenderManager public class WorldRenderManager implements GLSurfaceView.Renderr{
// Initialize a class for frame drawing.
 Public void onDrawFrame(GL10 unused){
// Set the openGL textureId for storing the camera preview stream data.
mSession.setCameraTextureName(mTextureDisplay.getExternalTextureId());
// Update the calculation result of AR Engine. You are advised to call this API when your app needs to obtain the latest data.
ARFrame arFrame = mSession.update();
// Obtains the camera specifications of the current frame.
ARCamera arCamera = arFrame.getCamera();
// Returns a projection matrix used for coordinate calculation, which can be used for the transformation from the camera coordinate system to the clip coordinate system.
arCamera.getProjectionMatrix(projectionMatrix, PROJ_MATRIX_OFFSET, PROJ_MATRIX_NEAR, PROJ_MATRIX_FAR);
Session.getAllTrackables(ARPlane.class)
...
 }
} 3) Initialize the class, which provides properties of the virtual object and the necessary methods for rendering the virtual object. VirtualObject Public class VirtualObject{
} 4) class to draw virtual objects based on specified parameters. Initialize the tDisplay Objec Public class ObjectDisplay{
} Development Procedure (Hit Test) Initialize the class, which manages rendering related to world scenarios, including label rendering and virtual object rendering. WorldRenderManager public class WorldRenderManager implementsGLSurfaceView.Renderer{
// Pass the context.
 public WorldRenderManager(Activity activity, Context context) {
  mActivity = activity;
       mContext = context;
  …
}
// Set ARSession, which updates and obtains the latest data in OnDrawFrame.
public void setArSession(ARSession arSession) {
        if (arSession == null) {
            LogUtil.error(TAG, "setSession error, arSession is null!");
            return;
        }
        mSession = arSession;
 }
// Set ARWorldTrackingConfig to obtain the configuration mode.
public void setArWorldTrackingConfig(ARWorldTrackingConfig arConfig) {
        if (arConfig == null) {
LogUtil.error(TAG, "setArWorldTrackingConfig error, arConfig is null!");
            return;
        }
        mArWorldTrackingConfig = arConfig;
    }
// Implement the onDrawFrame() method.
@Override
public void onDrawFrame(GL10 unused) {
 mSession.setCameraTextureName(mTextureDisplay.getExternalTextureId());
ARFrame arFrame = mSession.update();
ARCamera arCamera = arFrame.getCamera();
...
}
// Output the hit result.
private ARHitResult hitTest4Result(ARFrame frame, ARCamera camera, MotionEvent event) {
   ARHitResult hitResult = null;
   List<ARHitResult> hitTestResults = frame.hitTest(event);
// Determine whether the hit point is within the plane polygon.
ARHitResult hitResultTemp = hitTestResults.get(i);
            if (hitResultTemp == null) {
                continue;
            }
ARTrackable trackable = hitResultTemp.getTrackable();
// Determine whether the point cloud is tapped and whether the point faces the camera.
  boolean isPointHitJudge = trackable instanceof ARPoint
&& ((ARPoint) trackable).getOrientationMode() == ARPoint.OrientationMode.ESTIMATED_SURFACE_NORMAL;
// Select points on the plane preferentially.
if (isPlanHitJudge || isPointHitJudge) {
      hitResult = hitResultTemp;
      if (trackable instanceof ARPlane) {
                break;
             }
      }
return hitResult;
}
} 2) Create a object. This example demonstrates how to use the world AR scenario of AR Engine. WorldActivity public class WorldActivity extends BaseActivity {
 private ARSession mArSession;
private GLSurfaceView mSurfaceView;
private ARWorldTrackingConfig mConfig;
@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
  LogUtil.info(TAG, "onCreate");
       super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
       setContentView(R.layout.world_java_activity_main);
 mWorldRenderManager = new WorldRenderManager(this, this);
mWorldRenderManager.setDisplayRotationManage(mDisplayRotationManager);
mWorldRenderManager.setQueuedSingleTaps(mQueuedSingleTaps)  
}
@Override
protected void onResume() {
 if (!PermissionManager.hasPermission(this)) {
            this.finish();
        }
        errorMessage = null;
        if (mArSession == null) {
            try {
                if (!arEngineAbilityCheck()) {
                    finish();
                    return;
                }
                mArSession = new ARSession(this.getApplicationContext());
                mConfig = new ARWorldTrackingConfig(mArSession);
                refreshConfig(ARConfigBase.LIGHT_MODE_ENVIRONMENT_LIGHTING | ARConfigBase.LIGHT_MODE_ENVIRONMENT_TEXTURE);
            } catch (Exception capturedException) {
                setMessageWhenError(capturedException);
            }
            if (errorMessage != null) {
                stopArSession();
                return;
            }
}

@Override
    protected void onPause() {
        LogUtil.info(TAG, "onPause start.");
        super.onPause();
        if (mArSession != null) {
            mDisplayRotationManager.unregisterDisplayListener();
            mSurfaceView.onPause();
            mArSession.pause();
        }
        LogUtil.info(TAG, "onPause end.");
    }
@Override
    protected void onDestroy() {
        LogUtil.info(TAG, "onDestroy start.");
        if (mArSession != null) {
            mArSession.stop();
            mArSession = null;
        }
        if (mWorldRenderManager != null) {
            mWorldRenderManager.releaseARAnchor();
        }
        super.onDestroy();
        LogUtil.info(TAG, "onDestroy end.");
    }
...
} Summary If you've ever done any interior decorating, I'm sure you've wanted the ability to see what furniture would look like in your home without having to purchase them first. After all, most furniture isn't cheap and delivery and assembly can be quite a hassle. That's why apps that allow users to place and view virtual furniture in their real homes are truly life-changing technologies. HMS Core AR Engine can help greatly streamline the development of such apps. With its plane detection and hit test capabilities, the development kit enables your app to accurately detect planes in the real world, and then blend virtual objects naturally into the real world. In addition to virtual home decoration, this powerful kit also has a broad range of other applications. For example, you can leverage its capabilities to develop an AR video game, an AR-based teaching app that allows students to view historical artifacts in 3D, or an e-commerce app with a virtual try-on feature.

ALTWORLD

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ALTWORLD

altworld.in

51-200 employees

Since 2021

COMPANY RANKING

ALTWORLD

EVERGREEN INDEX #1885

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