Quran excerpts lead to LittleBig-Delay
Little Big Planet is a hotly anticipated
PS3 exclusive title in which little rag-dolls run about trying to solve the
mystery behind some contrived contraptions through teamwork, at least that’s
what I gather…Well, any game enthusiast will tell you that the retail date for a
blockbuster title is akin to Christmas; its something gamers truly look forward
too and baring the odd oversight, games tend to land spot on their launch
dates. Well, Christmas has been official delayed, at least for Little Big
Planet lovers. The delay is due to a recall. The recall is due to an offensive
use of the Quran; namely, passages from the text being used as lyrics in a
song. The issue arose on a PlayStation Community forum in which a forum
contributor expressed dissatisfaction with the usage of passages from the Quran
in a song.In an email sent to Sony and game developer Media Molecule, the following sentiments were conveyed:
“We Muslims consider
the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending. We hope you
would remove that track from the game immediately via an online update, and
make sure that all future shipments of the game disk do not contain it.”
LBP developer Media Molecule, having been
appraised of the oversight, immediately whipped together a ‘day-zero’ patch
that would remove the song but Sony thought better and simply recalled all
titles that had been released and delayed the North American launch.
But fear not; Little Big Planet will hit
shelves October 27th; merely a week from today.
- Touch-screen Bold?
We’ve just borne witness to the Storm, and
already rumours are swirling on the Net about the next BlackBerry. The folks
over at The Boy Genius blog have it that RIM is in fact working on a new
handset that would meld the functionality of the Bold with the size of the
Curve. Alright, sounds rather…mundane. But, and this is a palpable (and
anticlimactic) But, the new BlackBerry would
be a touch-screen device with “a physical QWERTY,” according to TBG.
Interesting…
- Elbot: The AI that almost beat the Turing
Test (You may be surprised)
There’s an article over on the BBC website
in which the author describes their conversation with Elbot; the little AI
program that almost fooled thirty percent of people into thinking he was in
fact a real human boy! According to Alan Turing (some dude from the Fifties thinking about AI before there were computers…) if people cannot distinguish a machine from a human, than the machine is, for all intents and purposes, intelligent. Since some people can be very discerning and creative in their conversations, only 3 out of 10 people would need to be convinced in order to pass the test. Elbot nearly achieved that feat and he did so with such persuasive lines of dialogue as:
“I always use an anti-rust spray in order
to keep my shiny reflection. And once a month I visit a body shop to have
myself polished and buffed.” And: “I have just like everybody else. Tell me how
you have.”
Ooh, evasive, just like my doctor. In fairness to Elbot, it should
be disclosed that the little AI program that couldn’t does not pretend to be a
human; in fact he fully discloses his mechanical nature and will be more than
happy to talk to you about his rust spots. Head on over to the article to hear
more zany lines from Elbot and then prepare to ask yourself; how did this
program fool even one person into thinking that he was human? What’s
more, if people are this easily fooled, then I think we need new Turing
standards; either that or we need to classify answering machines as certifiably
intelligent lifeforms (cuz you know when you call your buddy and his machine picks up but the message is all casual…Fool me once Hernando, fool
me once…)
So this is the game my brother in law was talking about. I personally don’t think that this game sounds all that fun and I don’t tend to pay attention to the music in games when I do play them.
I am pleased they removed the music that caused offence. Games should be fun is not necessary to offend. It is a pity that Sony did not withdraw their game last year when they caused offence by using Manchester Cathedral as the backdrop for a violent computer game.