Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2015 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

Ever competed against a magazine? Well, Muse hereby challenges you to a game of Get to Six. We’ll play as you read this article—this is how The first player (you, as promised) starts by choosing either the number 1 or the number 2. Then the second player +Muse) will choose 1 or 2. We’ll add our choice to yours to get a total. Then you and Muse will continue to take turns picking 1 or 2. Each choice will be added to the total. The player who first gets the total to equal wins. Ready? For your first turn, do you choose 1 or 2? Fair Warning This game of Get to Six isn’t just a pleasant pastime between old friends. It’s also a demonstration of basic game theory. Game…

A ghost chases you through a maze. Chomp that energy pill, Pac-Man! Whew, the ghost ran off. How do ghosts in “Pac-Man” and other game characters know when to chase and when to flee? They’re smart! Well, no, but they do have a form of artificial intelligence (AI). A programmer wrote computer code, or a set of rules, to act as their brains. Game AI code tells characters where to go and what to do based on what’s happening in the game. These characters have to act smart—but the game also has to be fun. When developers find just the right mix of fun and brains, you get game heaven. Ready, Set, Change State! AI programmers use many different methods to bring game characters to life. A finite state machine…

The Game Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) brings together game makers and technology specialists to research and develop all kinds of games—plus teach students how to make their own. Lee Gjertsen Malone is a journalist, photographer, and author who lives near MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She enjoys playing games, but unfortunately has never created one.…

The dragon rises above me, breathing flames into the night air. Stone ramparts crumble in the township; houses burn. Screams echo all around me. I have only one chance. His jaws open. I draw my sword. But before I can react he’s snatching me into his talons, throwing me in his mouth, and the hero. . . dies. In exactly the same place. Again. It’s completely unfair. I throw my control pad on the floor, scream at the screen, and walk out of my bedroom in disgust. Sound familiar? Frustration is something every gamer knows all too well. But why do some video games completely absorb us in their world while others leave us howling at the screen? The answer has less to do with your ability to press buttons…

Nothing beats the thrill of scientific discovery. But classifying thousands of pictures of fungi or tracing nerve cells through millions of images? That gets old fast. Computers can automate some time-consuming tasks. But computers can’t decipher the spidery writing in 170-year-old ships’ logs. They can’t distinguish the shapes of different shark fins photographed from strange angles. Many scientific tasks require human levels of language ability or pattern recognition. But no one wants to spend all day squinting at 19th-century weather reports or classifying shark photos. What if there was a clever way to speed up data collection? Citizen Science at Play Scientists have launched video games to collect data for projects ranging from genetics to nanotechnology. Anyone can play these citizen science games. Hundreds of thousands of gamers do. These…

Alight beam skims the surface of a table strewn with geometrical objects. As the glowing bar passes over each object in turn, you hear eerie sounds related to the shape and placement of the object. You can even create your own weird music by shifting the rectangles, circles, and other everyday shapes into new positions. Golan Levin, an artist at Carnegie Mellon University, created this audiovisual installation. He calls it “Scrapple.” Levin’s system is essentially a scanner that reads and interprets the positions and shapes of objects. It works a bit like a musician converting the notes he or she sees on a sheet of music into a sequence of sounds. In this case, the table and its objects are not only the score but also a musical instrument. In…

What can games do? More than you might think! Rather than just existing for our enjoyment (which is a pretty good reason all by itself), games can help solve real problems. One of the many games Rik Eberhardt, the studio manager of MIT’s Game Lab, has worked on is “Elude.” It was designed to help kids understand depression. “Maybe they’ve got an older sibling who’s depressed,” says Eberhardt, and non-game solutions haven’t helped. For “Elude,” Eberhardt and the folks at the Game Lab started with a “platformer,” a type of game most kids are familiar with—basically, you make your avatar jump from one platform to another. They thought about things that were hard to understand about depression. For example, the way a depressed person might seem tired all the time.…

For years, girls and women were discouraged from computer science education and jobs. Some women who work in the video game industry describe an aggressive or intolerant atmosphere. The number of girls who major in computer science in college rose slightly in recent years—from 13.8% in 2009 to 14.2% in 2011—and the number of women working in video game development doubled during that time. Despite these gains, today less than 12% of programmers are women. Even fewer are black women. Nonprofits like Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code want to increase the number of women working in programming jobs. What awaits these future programmers? Meet four women who have made creating games their life’s work. STACY LAYTON Company: Electronic Arts (EA), Salt Lake City, Utah Layton started her coding…

SINGULAR SNAPSHOTS Argh! This January, someone lost our favorite photo of Feather’s one-of-a-kind hybrid cactus pumpkin. Thankfully, you sent us some completely unique photos to replace it. Muse HQ: officially redecorated. KOKO'S KUDOS This month’s runners-up are Clare D., age 11, Montana; Cecilia H., age 13, Texas; and Flora S., age 9, Colorado. You can find their entries and more contests at musemagkids.com/museum. New CONTEST The Big Bad Come on, admit it. Deep down, don’t you have a soft spot for villains—at least the ones you make up yourself? Send us a drawing of the final-level, almost-unbeatable bad guy from your imaginary video game. Contest Rules 1. Your contest entry must be your very own original work. Ideas and words should not be copied. 2. Be sure to include your…

Damian Isla is a cofounder and software engineer at The Molasses Flood, an independent video game company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previously he worred as an artificial intelligence (AI) programmer on the games “Halo 2,” “Halo 3,” “BioShoc Infinite,” and “Destiny.” Q Did you dream of working on video games when you were young? A I knew that I wanted to work on games, and then when I got a little bit older, I thought games were for kids. I wanted to go work for NASA! Q What changed your mind? A I looked at what I had done for my Master’s thesis [in computer science], and I thought that it looked a lot like a game already. On top of that, games were a fantastic way to combine both sides…

Q: Was there life on Mars ever? And if scientists found a way to live on a different planet, would they tell people they could live there and make it a new Earth?? —Emilyann O., age 11 A: Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, has been wondering about these two questions ever since he learned that Mars wasn’t always the frozen wasteland it is today. Billions of years ago, “Mars had rivers and lakes and oceans,” McKay says. To keep all that liquid water from freezing, Mars must have also been a lot warmer, with a thick atmosphere trapping the sun’s heat. In short, McKay says, ancient Mars “was very much like Earth.” So could life have evolved there too? McKay thinks it probably did, since…

Dear Muse, I almost had a heart attack when you published my idea for spending time in a space elevator in the magazine! I have to tell you it is a great honor! Now, a message for all the pi lovers reading Muse: WHAT IS SO GREAT ABOUT PI?!?!?! SURE IT IS THE CIRCLE CONSTANT AND HAS INFINITE DECIMAL PLACES BUT SO WHAT?!?!?! PLUS TAU IS SO MUCH BETTER TO USE IN RADIANCE!!! I WILL GO RABID IF I READ ONE MORE LETTER ABOUT PI AND ITS AWESOMENESS!! ALSO I THINK THAT IT IS ABOUT TIME VI HART GOT A MENTION!!!!!!!! See Vi Hart’s Anti-Pi Rant video to see evidence. Daria; age 10 years, nine months, 13 days; writing from the headquarters of the ISBOSPFOP (International Society Bent on Stopping…

If you play lots of video games, you’ve probably blasted a zombie into tiny bits. Some games pile on the blood and guts. The label “M” warns that a game contains mature content. Many adults worry that playing a game like this could make you act violently in real life. Is that true? The American Academy of Pediatrics says that violence in any kind of media—from TV to music to video games—poses a risk to kids’ health. A number of studies have shown a link between video games and aggression, including one published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2014. In this study, more than 3,000 kids answered survey questions during a two-year period. Kids who played violent video games showed an increase in aggressive thoughts and behaviors. (For example, thinking it’s…