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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_bubble] | [TOKENS: 2401] |
Contents AI bubble The AI bubble is a theorised stock market bubble growing amidst the AI boom, a period of rapid increase in investment in artificial intelligence (AI) that is affecting the broader economy. Speculation about a bubble largely originates from concerns that leading AI tech firms are involved in a circular flow of investments that are artificially inflating the value of their stocks. Speculation has also come from comparisons between the current environment of tech financing and that of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s and 2000s. History In late January 2025, the unexpectedly successful launch of the Chinese-made chatbot DeepSeek resulted in concerns about a possible AI bubble. The stock prices of many AI companies dropped, such as Nvidia's shares dropping 17% in one day. Nvidia's share price recovered 8.8% the following day. In August 2025, a report by Nanda (Networked Agents and Decentralized AI), under Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT Media Lab stated "despite $30–40 billion [USD] in enterprise investment into Gen[erative]AI, [...] 95% of organizations are getting zero return". Spending from US mega caps is expected to reach $1.1 trillion between 2026 and 2029, and total AI spending is expected to surpass $1.6 trillion. Due to the growing demand for semiconductors to sustain AI technologies, Nvidia became the highest valued company in the world and the first to ever have reached a market value of $4 trillion in July 2025. The figure had quadrupled since 2023, when it surpassed $1 trillion. The company's value made up roughly 7.3% of the S&P 500, which hit an all-time high. In October 2025, the company's value grew beyond $5 trillion, rising higher than the GDP of every country except for the US and China, according to data from the World Bank. Over the year 2025, AI-related enterprises accounted for roughly 80% of gains in the American stock market. Some sceptics warned that the rapid rise of AI tech firms may be the result of excessive financial engineering. Microsoft disclosed that it had spent almost $35 billion on AI infrastructure in the three months leading up to the end of September. In October, it became the second most valuable company in the world largely due to its 27% stake in OpenAI. While seeing increases in revenue by 18% and in net income by 12%, share values dropped by 4% in after-hours trading amid investors' concerns about the possible costs of sustaining the AI boom. In late 2025, 30% of the US S&P 500 and 20% of the MSCI World index was solely held up by the five largest companies, which was the greatest concentration in half a century, and share valuations were reportedly the most stretched since the dot-com bubble. Experts warned that AI companies were extremely overvalued, with the S&P 500 trading at 23 times forward earnings, and the FTSE Index trading at 14 times, showing how expensive the US market had become. The Case–Shiller price-to-earnings ratio for the US market also exceeded 40 for the first time since the dot-com crash. Speculation 24 November 2025 Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT, stated in 2025 that he believed that an AI bubble is ongoing. In early 2025, Bridgewater Associates co-chief investment officer Ray Dalio said that the current levels of investment in AI are "very similar" to the dot-com bubble. In September 2025, the Australian Financial Review said that "If we really are in another share-market bubble, it's surely the most anticipated example in history." In October of that year, Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan, the largest bank in the US, said he thinks "AI is real" but said he believes some money invested now will be wasted. He also said there is a higher chance of a meaningful drop in stocks over the following two years than the market was reflecting. Dimon warned that an AI-driven stock crash could result in a lot of invested money being lost, although he acknowledged that AI "[would] pay off […] just like cars in total paid off, and TVs in total paid off, but most people involved in them didn't do well". However, he further stated on AI that "the level of uncertainty should be higher in most people's minds". The value of technology company stocks have been inflated based on AI hype regardless of market fundamentals or the financial reality behind monetizing AI products. A National Bureau of Economic Research study published in February 2026, found that despite 90% of firms reporting no impact of AI on workplace and productivity, executives projected AI to increase productivity by 1.4% and increase output by 0.8%, leading to comparison with productivity paradox. OpenAI committed to spending $1.4 trillion over 8 years in building new datacenters, partnering with Nvidia to deliver 10 gigawatts of datacenter compute, with just $13 billion in revenue. This long term spending is funded by debt. An estimate from Morgan Stanley put global spending on datacenters between 2025 and 2028 at $3 trillion, $1.5 trillion of which is covered by private credit. OpenAI has failed to present a reasonable roadmap to profitability or how it will pay for these investments. In November 2025, OpenAI said it expected to report annual losses through 2028, including $74 billion in operating losses in 2028 alone. The Wall Street journal obtained financial documents where OpenAI projects significant profits in 2030 despite preceding years of deep losses. Deutsche Bank analyst Jim Reid estimated OpenAI's losses amounting to $140 billion between 2024 and 2029. Aside from its sizable expenditures in datacenters, OpenAI has also been incurring rising inference costs as time goes on, making ChatGPT increasingly costly to run when a user submits a prompt. In 2024, they spent $3.76 billion on inference which rose to $5.02 billion on inference with Microsoft Azure in just the first half of 2025. Former Fidelity manager George Noble said that OpenAI is "burning $15 million per day on Sora alone." He also highlighted that AI companies will face diminishing returns in model improvements paired with rising costs, saying that "It's going to cost 5x the energy and money to make these models 2x better." OpenAI has been projected to run out of money by mid-2027. Concerns were raised that leading AI tech firms were using circular financing and investment to artificially boost their valuations. In September, Nvidia made a $100 billion investment into OpenAI, expanding the pre-existing stake that it held in the company. This agreement was made on the expectation that OpenAI would power additional data centres using the GPUs that it had been buying from Nvidia, establishing a circular flow of money. On 9 September 2025, Nvidia entered into an $6.3 billion agreement with AI cloud-computing provider CoreWeave to purchase the latter's unsold data center capacity through to April 13, 2032. Nvidia held 7% of CoreWeave shares as at 31 March 2025, and is also supplying GPUs to the company. In October 2025, OpenAI purchased billions of dollars worth of electronics from AMD, a rival of Nvidia, to supply its development of AI in an agreement that made it one of the largest shareholders in the company. Microsoft also held a large stake in OpenAI, and Oracle Corporation, a computing company, also entered into a $300 billion deal with the company. The Bank of England warned of the growing risks of a global market correction due to a possible overvaluation of leading AI tech firms in the stock market, such as OpenAI, which more than tripled its value from $157 billion in October 2024 to $500 billion the following year. These valuations, they claimed, could be further harmed if the infrastructure requirements for sustaining the technology were too high to be met. They added that investors were not properly cautioned about the risks of a stock market crash were AI to fall short of market expectations. The International Monetary Fund agreed with and reinforced the bank's claims. Kristalina Georgieva, a Bulgarian economist and the 12th managing director of the IMF, also drew comparisons to the dot-com bubble of 2001, highlighting that a market correction could stunt global growth and weaken the economies of developing countries. Debt funding has also raised the risk of the bubble. Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimated that debt used to fund data centers could exceed $1 trillion by 2028. The AI bubble has drawn comparisons to the dot-com bubble of the 2000s. Billionaire investor Ray Dalio, who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, warned that the AI bubble echoes the dot-com in the overvaluation of tech stocks amid low interest rates. Ed Zitron has eschewed direct comparisons to the dot-com bubble, writing that the AI bubble is far larger and more destructive than the dot-com bubble popping was. The underlying asset powering the AI bubble, GPUs, are much more limited in their costs and utility compared to the dot-com bubble's networking and fiber infrastructure that helped power the internet. He contextualizes the AI bubble as part of the larger "rot economy" that prioritizes growth-at-all-costs. In the rot economy, Zitron writes that "Businesses are expected to be - and rewarded for being - eternal burning engines of capital that create more and more shareholder value". Julien Garran, a researcher and partner at MacroStrategy Partnership, published a report in October 2025 that called the AI bubble "the biggest and most dangerous bubble the world has ever seen" that is 17 times larger than the dot-com bubble. Opposing views Strategies from major financial institutions have largely dismissed concerns regarding an artificial "AI bubble," attributing the surge in equity valuations to tangible fundamental strength rather than speculative mania. Goldman Sachs chief equity strategist argues that the rapid appreciation in stock prices is substantiated by robust and sustained profit growth in earnings and fundamentals among large-cap AI and technology incumbents. The firm notes that valuation multiples for the market leaders of the post-2022 bull run—specifically forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios—remain modest compared to the excesses of the dot-com era. Similarly, Morgan Stanley analysts argued the fear of a bubble is "misplaced" or "premature." Their research highlights a structural shift in corporate financial health: the median cash flow and capital reserves of the top 500 US firms are approximately triple those observed during historical bubble periods. Furthermore, they distinguish current market leaders by their durable earnings streams and robust margin profiles, contrasting them with the hype-driven, revenue-negative valuations of the late 1990s. JPMorgan reinforces this stance, stating that the sector does not meet the classic criteria for a financial bubble. In a December 2025 analysis, the bank applied a five-factor diagnostic framework to the AI rally, concluding that the sector exhibits genuine structural utility rather than pure speculation. The report emphasizes that AI represents a transformative economic driver, with capital inflows tied directly to measurable enterprise growth and revenue generation. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has also distinguished the current economic landscape from the dot-com bubble. Powell posits that the AI sector is underpinned by substantial realized revenue and that the massive capital expenditure (CapEx) directed toward AI data centres is functioning as a major engine of broader economic growth, rather than a sink for speculative capital. See also References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft#cite_note-GGaward-316] | [TOKENS: 12858] |
Contents Minecraft Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Following its initial public alpha release in 2009, it was formally released in 2011 for personal computers. The game has since been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles. In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated world with virtually infinite terrain made up of voxels (cubes). They can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, build structures, fight hostile mobs, and cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game's large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. Originally created by Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java programming language, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten was handed control over the game's development following its full release. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the unified cross-platform version which evolved from the Pocket Edition codebase[i] and replaced the legacy console versions. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang's original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history with over 350 million copies sold. It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing it. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025 and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time. Gameplay Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, giving players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a voxel grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. Very few blocks are affected by gravity, instead maintaining their voxel position in the air. Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or bows and arrows), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with villagers (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes. The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks). There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively. The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is randomly chosen at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures, worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not. Implementation of horizontally infinite generation initially resulted in a glitch termed the "Far Lands" at over 12 million blocks away from the world center, where terrain generated as wall-like, fissured patterns. The Far Lands and associated glitches were considered the effective edge of the world until they were resolved, with the current horizontal limit instead being a special impassable barrier called the world border, located 30 million blocks away. Vertical space is comparatively limited, with an unbreakable bedrock layer at the bottom and a building limit several hundred blocks into the sky. Minecraft features three independent dimensions accessible through portals and providing alternate game environments. The Overworld is the starting dimension and represents the real world, with a terrestrial surface setting including plains, mountains, forests, oceans, caves, and small sources of lava. The Nether is a hell-like underworld dimension accessed via an obsidian portal and composed mainly of lava. Mobs that populate the Nether include shrieking, fireball-shooting ghasts, alongside anthropomorphic pigs called piglins and their zombified counterparts. Piglins in particular have a bartering system, where players can give them gold ingots and receive items in return. Structures known as Nether Fortresses generate in the Nether, containing mobs such as wither skeletons and blazes, which can drop blaze rods needed to access the End dimension. The player can also choose to build an optional boss mob known as the Wither, using skulls obtained from wither skeletons and soul sand. The End can be reached through an end portal, consisting of twelve end portal frames. End portals are found in underground structures in the Overworld known as strongholds. To find strongholds, players must craft eyes of ender using an ender pearl and blaze powder. Eyes of ender can then be thrown, traveling in the direction of the stronghold. Once the player reaches the stronghold, they can place eyes of ender into each portal frame to activate the end portal. The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island. Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which, when entered, cues the game's ending credits and the End Poem, a roughly 1,500-word work written by Irish novelist Julian Gough, which takes about nine minutes to scroll past, is the game's only narrative text, and the only text of significant length directed at the player.: 10–12 At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely. In Survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night. The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from mobs, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game unless the player is playing on peaceful difficulty. If the hunger bar is empty, the player starves. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful. Upon losing all health, players die. The items in the players' inventories are dropped unless the game is reconfigured not to do so. Players then re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game and can be changed by sleeping in a bed or using a respawn anchor. Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points (commonly referred to as "xp" or "exp") by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, animal breeding, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects. The game features two more game modes based on Survival, known as Hardcore mode and Adventure mode. Hardcore mode plays identically to Survival mode, but with the game's difficulty setting locked to "Hard" and with permadeath, forcing them to delete the world or explore it as a spectator after dying. Adventure mode was added to the game in a post-launch update, and prevents the player from directly modifying the game's world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended. In Creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly. Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their characters usually do not take any damage nor are affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance. Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. It is available through direct game-to-game multiplayer, local area network (LAN) play, local split screen (console-only), and servers (player-hosted and business-hosted). Players can run their own server by making a realm, using a host provider, hosting one themselves or connect directly to another player's game via Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or Nintendo Switch Online. Single-player worlds have LAN support, allowing players to join a world on locally interconnected computers without a server setup. Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed or disallowed to enter the server. Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. The largest and most popular server is Hypixel, which has been visited by over 14 million unique players. Player versus player combat (PvP) can be enabled to allow fighting between players. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without having to set up their own. Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use server addresses. Minecraft: Java Edition Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at a time. Minecraft Realms server owners can invite up to 3,000 people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at one time. The Minecraft: Java Edition Realms servers do not support user-made plugins, but players can play custom Minecraft maps. Minecraft Bedrock Realms servers support user-made add-ons, resource packs, behavior packs, and custom Minecraft maps. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, support for cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android platforms was added through Realms starting in June 2016, with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017, and support for virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play. Nintendo Switch support for Realms was released in July 2018. The modding community consists of fans, users and third-party programmers. Using a variety of application program interfaces that have arisen over time, they have produced a wide variety of downloadable content for Minecraft, such as modifications, texture packs and custom maps. Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms. The modding community is responsible for a substantial supply of mods from ones that enhance gameplay, such as mini-maps, waypoints, and durability counters, to ones that add to the game elements from other video games and media. While a variety of mod frameworks were independently developed by reverse engineering the code, Mojang has also enhanced vanilla Minecraft with official frameworks for modification, allowing the production of community-created resource packs, which alter certain game elements including textures and sounds. Players can also create their own "maps" (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. Mojang added an adventure mode in August 2012 and "command blocks" in October 2012, which were created specially for custom maps in Java Edition. Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation. The Xbox 360 Edition supported downloadable content, which was available to purchase via the Xbox Games Store; these content packs usually contained additional character skins. It later received support for texture packs in its twelfth title update while introducing "mash-up packs", which combined texture packs with skin packs and changes to the game's sounds, music and user interface. The first mash-up pack (and by extension, the first texture pack) for the Xbox 360 Edition was released on 4 September 2013, and was themed after the Mass Effect franchise. Unlike Java Edition, however, the Xbox 360 Edition did not support player-made mods or custom maps. A cross-promotional resource pack based on the Super Mario franchise by Nintendo was released exclusively for the Wii U Edition worldwide on 17 May 2016, and later bundled free with the Nintendo Switch Edition at launch. Another based on Fallout was released on consoles that December, and for Windows and Mobile in April 2017. In April 2018, malware was discovered in several downloadable user-made Minecraft skins for use with the Java Edition of the game. Avast stated that nearly 50,000 accounts were infected, and when activated, the malware would attempt to reformat the user's hard drive. Mojang promptly patched the issue, and released a statement stating that "the code would not be run or read by the game itself", and would run only when the image containing the skin itself was opened. In June 2017, Mojang released the "1.1 Discovery Update" to the Pocket Edition of the game, which later became the Bedrock Edition. The update introduced the "Marketplace", a catalogue of purchasable user-generated content intended to give Minecraft creators "another way to make a living from the game". Various skins, maps, texture packs and add-ons from different creators can be bought with "Minecoins", a digital currency that is purchased with real money. Additionally, users can access specific content with a subscription service titled "Marketplace Pass". Alongside content from independent creators, the Marketplace also houses items published by Mojang and Microsoft themselves, as well as official collaborations between Minecraft and other intellectual properties. By 2022, the Marketplace had over 1.7 billion content downloads, generating over $500 million in revenue. Development Before creating Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was a game developer at King, where he worked until March 2009. At King, he primarily developed browser games and learned several programming languages. During his free time, he prototyped his own games, often drawing inspiration from other titles, and was an active participant on the TIGSource forums for independent developers. One such project was "RubyDung", a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with an isometric, three-dimensional perspective similar to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Among the features in RubyDung that he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper, though he ultimately discarded this idea, feeling the graphics were too pixelated at the time. Around March 2009, Persson left King and joined jAlbum, while continuing to work on his prototypes. Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game first released in April 2009, inspired Persson's vision for RubyDung's future direction. Infiniminer heavily influenced the visual style of gameplay, including bringing back the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements. The first public alpha build of Minecraft was released on 17 May 2009 on TIGSource. Over the years, Persson regularly released test builds that added new features, including tools, mobs, and entire new dimensions. In 2011, partly due to the game's rising popularity, Persson decided to release a full 1.0 version—a second part of the "Adventure Update"—on 18 November 2011. Shortly after, Persson stepped down from development, handing the project's lead to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten. On 15 September 2014, Microsoft, the developer behind the Microsoft Windows operating system and Xbox video game console, announced a $2.5 billion acquisition of Mojang, which included the Minecraft intellectual property. Persson had suggested the deal on Twitter, asking a corporation to buy his stake in the game after receiving criticism for enforcing terms in the game's end-user license agreement (EULA), which had been in place for the past three years. According to Persson, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh received a call from a Microsoft executive shortly after the tweet, asking if Persson was serious about a deal. Mojang was also approached by other companies including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The deal with Microsoft was arbitrated on 6 November 2014 and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires". After 2014, Minecraft's primary versions received usually annual major updates—free to players who have purchased the game— each primarily centered around a specific theme. For instance, version 1.13, the Update Aquatic, focused on ocean-related features, while version 1.16, the Nether Update, introduced significant changes to the Nether dimension. However, in late 2024, Mojang announced a shift in their update strategy; rather than releasing large updates annually, they opted for a more frequent release schedule with smaller, incremental updates, stating, "We know that you want new Minecraft content more often." The Bedrock Edition has also received regular updates, now matching the themes of the Java Edition updates. Other versions of the game, such as various console editions and the Pocket Edition, were either merged into Bedrock or discontinued and have not received further updates. On 7 May 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free. On 16 April 2020, a Bedrock Edition-exclusive beta version of Minecraft, called Minecraft RTX, was released by Nvidia. It introduced physically-based rendering, real-time path tracing, and DLSS for RTX-enabled GPUs. The public release was made available on 8 December 2020. Path tracing can only be enabled in supported worlds, which can be downloaded for free via the in-game Minecraft Marketplace, with a texture pack from Nvidia's website, or with compatible third-party texture packs. It cannot be enabled by default with any texture pack on any world. Initially, Minecraft RTX was affected by many bugs, display errors, and instability issues. On 22 March 2025, a new visual mode called Vibrant Visuals, an optional graphical overhaul similar to Minecraft RTX, was announced. It promises modern rendering features—such as dynamic shadows, screen space reflections, volumetric fog, and bloom—without the need of RTX-capable hardware. Vibrant Visuals was released as a part of the Chase the Skies update on 17 June 2025 for Bedrock Edition and is planned to release on Java Edition at a later date. Development began for the original edition of Minecraft—then known as Cave Game, and now known as the Java Edition—in May 2009,[k] and ended on 13 May, when Persson released a test video on YouTube of an early version of the game, dubbed the "Cave game tech test" or the "Cave game tech demo". The game was named Minecraft: Order of the Stone the next day, after a suggestion made by a player. "Order of the Stone" came from the webcomic The Order of the Stick, and "Minecraft" was chosen "because it's a good name". The title was later shortened to just Minecraft, omitting the subtitle. Persson completed the game's base programming over a weekend in May 2009, and private testing began on TigIRC on 16 May. The first public release followed on 17 May 2009 as a developmental version shared on the TIGSource forums. Based on feedback from forum users, Persson continued updating the game. This initial public build later became known as Classic. Further developmental phases—dubbed Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev—were released throughout 2009 and 2010. The first major update, known as Alpha, was released on 30 June 2010. At the time, Persson was still working a day job at jAlbum but later resigned to focus on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version surged. Updates were distributed automatically, introducing new blocks, items, mobs, and changes to game mechanics such as water flow. With revenue generated from the game, Persson founded Mojang, a video game studio, alongside former colleagues Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh. On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft would enter its beta phase on 20 December. He assured players that bug fixes and all pre-release updates would remain free. As development progressed, Mojang expanded, hiring additional employees to work on the project. The game officially exited beta and launched in full on 18 November 2011. On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead designer. On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced the hiring of the developers behind Bukkit, a popular developer API for Minecraft servers, to improve Minecraft's support of server modifications. This move included Mojang taking apparent ownership of the CraftBukkit server mod, though this apparent acquisition later became controversial, and its legitimacy was questioned due to CraftBukkit's open-source nature and licensing under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License. In August 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released as an early alpha for the Xperia Play via the Android Market, later expanding to other Android devices on 8 October 2011. The iOS version followed on 17 November 2011. A port was made available for Windows Phones shortly after Microsoft acquired Mojang. Unlike Java Edition, Pocket Edition initially focused on Minecraft's creative building and basic survival elements but lacked many features of the PC version. Bergensten confirmed on Twitter that the Pocket Edition was written in C++ rather than Java, as iOS does not support Java. On 10 December 2014, a port of Pocket Edition was released for Windows Phone 8.1. In July 2015, a port of the Pocket Edition to Windows 10 was released as the Windows 10 Edition, with full crossplay to other Pocket versions. In January 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer maintain the Windows Phone versions of Pocket Edition. On 20 September 2017, with the "Better Together Update", the Pocket Edition was ported to the Xbox One, and was renamed to the Bedrock Edition. The console versions of Minecraft debuted with the Xbox 360 edition, developed by 4J Studios and released on 9 May 2012. Announced as part of the Xbox Live Arcade NEXT promotion, this version introduced a redesigned crafting system, a new control interface, in-game tutorials, split-screen multiplayer, and online play via Xbox Live. Unlike the PC version, its worlds were finite, bordered by invisible walls. Initially, the Xbox 360 version resembled outdated PC versions but received updates to bring it closer to Java Edition before eventually being discontinued. The Xbox One version launched on 5 September 2014, featuring larger worlds and support for more players. Minecraft expanded to PlayStation platforms with PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 editions released on 17 December 2013 and 4 September 2014, respectively. Originally planned as a PS4 launch title, it was delayed before its eventual release. A PlayStation Vita version followed in October 2014. Like the Xbox versions, the PlayStation editions were developed by 4J Studios. Nintendo platforms received Minecraft: Wii U Edition on 17 December 2015, with a physical release in North America on 17 June 2016 and in Europe on 30 June. The Nintendo Switch version launched via the eShop on 11 May 2017. During a Nintendo Direct presentation on 13 September 2017, Nintendo announced that Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition, based on the Pocket Edition, would be available for download immediately after the livestream, and a physical copy available on a later date. The game is compatible only with the New Nintendo 3DS or New Nintendo 2DS XL systems and does not work with the original 3DS or 2DS systems. On 20 September 2017, the Better Together Update introduced Bedrock Edition across Xbox One, Windows 10, VR, and mobile platforms, enabling cross-play between these versions. Bedrock Edition later expanded to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, with the latter receiving the update in December 2019, allowing cross-platform play for users with a free Xbox Live account. The Bedrock Edition released a native version for PlayStation 5 on 22 October 2024, while the Xbox Series X/S version launched on 17 June 2025. On 18 December 2018, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, and Wii U versions of Minecraft received their final update and would later become known as "Legacy Console Editions". On 15 January 2019, the New Nintendo 3DS version of Minecraft received its final update, effectively becoming discontinued as well. An educational version of Minecraft, designed for use in schools, launched on 1 November 2016. It is available on Android, ChromeOS, iPadOS, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. On 20 August 2018, Mojang announced that it would bring Education Edition to iPadOS in Autumn 2018. It was released to the App Store on 6 September 2018. On 27 March 2019, it was announced that it would be operated by JD.com in China. On 26 June 2020, a public beta for the Education Edition was made available to Google Play Store compatible Chromebooks. The full game was released to the Google Play Store for Chromebooks on 7 August 2020. On 20 May 2016, China Edition (also known as My World) was announced as a localized edition for China, where it was released under a licensing agreement between NetEase and Mojang. The PC edition was released for public testing on 8 August 2017. The iOS version was released on 15 September 2017, and the Android version was released on 12 October 2017. The PC edition is based on the original Java Edition, while the iOS and Android mobile versions are based on the Bedrock Edition. The edition is free-to-play and had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. This version of Bedrock Edition is exclusive to Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The beta release for Windows 10 launched on the Windows Store on 29 July 2015. After nearly a year and a half in beta, Microsoft fully released the version on 19 December 2016. Called the "Ender Update", this release implemented new features to this version of Minecraft like world templates and add-on packs. On 7 June 2022, the Java and Bedrock Editions of Minecraft were merged into a single bundle for purchase on Windows; those who owned one version would automatically gain access to the other version. Both game versions would otherwise remain separate. Around 2011, prior to Minecraft's full release, Mojang collaborated with The Lego Group to create a Lego brick-based Minecraft game called Brickcraft. This would have modified the base Minecraft game to use Lego bricks, which meant adapting the basic 1×1 block to account for larger pieces typically used in Lego sets. Persson worked on an early version called "Project Rex Kwon Do", named after the character of the same name from the film Napoleon Dynamite. Although Lego approved the project and Mojang assigned two developers for six months, it was canceled due to the Lego Group's demands, according to Mojang's Daniel Kaplan. Lego considered buying Mojang to complete the game, but when Microsoft offered over $2 billion for the company, Lego stepped back, unsure of Minecraft's potential. On 26 June 2025, a build of Brickcraft dated 28 June 2012 was published on a community archive website Omniarchive. Initially, Markus Persson planned to support the Oculus Rift with a Minecraft port. However, after Facebook acquired Oculus in 2013, he abruptly canceled the plans, stating, "Facebook creeps me out." In 2016, a community-made mod, Minecraft VR, added VR support for Java Edition, followed by Vivecraft for HTC Vive. Later that year, Microsoft introduced official Oculus Rift support for Windows 10 Edition, leading to the discontinuation of the Minecraft VR mod due to trademark complaints. Vivecraft was endorsed by Minecraft VR contributors for its Rift support. Also available is a Gear VR version, titled Minecraft: Gear VR Edition. Windows Mixed Reality support was added in 2017. On 7 September 2020, Mojang Studios announced that the PlayStation 4 Bedrock version would receive PlayStation VR support later that month. In September 2024, the Minecraft team announced they would no longer support PlayStation VR, which received its final update in March 2025. Music and sound design Minecraft's music and sound effects were produced by German musician Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. To create the sound effects for the game, Rosenfeld made extensive use of Foley techniques. On learning the processes for the game, he remarked, "Foley's an interesting thing, and I had to learn its subtleties. Early on, I wasn't that knowledgeable about it. It's a whole trial-and-error process. You just make a sound and eventually you go, 'Oh my God, that's it! Get the microphone!' There's no set way of doing anything at all." He reminisced on creating the in-game sound for grass blocks, stating "It turns out that to make grass sounds you don't actually walk on grass and record it, because grass sounds like nothing. What you want to do is get a VHS, break it apart, and just lightly touch the tape." According to Rosenfeld, his favorite sound to design for the game was the hisses of spiders. He elaborates, "I like the spiders. Recording that was a whole day of me researching what a spider sounds like. Turns out, there are spiders that make little screeching sounds, so I think I got this recording of a fire hose, put it in a sampler, and just pitched it around until it sounded like a weird spider was talking to you." Many of the sound design decisions by Rosenfeld were done accidentally or spontaneously. The creeper notably lacks any specific noises apart from a loud fuse-like sound when about to explode; Rosenfeld later recalled "That was just a complete accident by Markus and me [sic]. We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work hilariously well, so we kept it." On other sounds, such as those of the zombie, Rosenfeld remarked, "I actually never wanted the zombies so scary. I intentionally made them sound comical. It's nice to hear that they work so well [...]." Rosenfeld remarked that the sound engine was "terrible" to work with, remembering "If you had two song files at once, it [the game engine] would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine." The background music in Minecraft consists of instrumental ambient music. To compose the music of Minecraft, Rosenfeld used the package from Ableton Live, along with several additional plug-ins. Speaking on them, Rosenfeld said "They can be pretty much everything from an effect to an entire orchestra. Additionally, I've got some synthesizers that are attached to the computer. Like a Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet 08 and a Virus TI." On 4 March 2011, Rosenfeld released a soundtrack titled Minecraft – Volume Alpha; it includes most of the tracks featured in Minecraft, as well as other music not featured in the game. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku chose the music in Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011. On 9 November 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Beta, which included the music that was added in a 2013 "Music Update" for the game. A physical release of Volume Alpha, consisting of CDs, black vinyl, and limited-edition transparent green vinyl LPs, was issued by indie electronic label Ghostly International on 21 August 2015. On 14 August 2020, Ghostly released Volume Beta on CD and vinyl, with alternate color LPs and lenticular cover pressings released in limited quantities. The final update Rosenfeld worked on was 2018's 1.13 Update Aquatic. His music remained the only music in the game until 2020's "Nether Update", introducing pieces from Lena Raine. Since then, other composers have made contributions, including Kumi Tanioka, Samuel Åberg, Aaron Cherof, and Amos Roddy, with Raine remaining as the new primary composer. Ownership of all music besides Rosenfeld's independently released albums has been retained by Microsoft, with their label publishing all of the other artists' releases. Gareth Coker also composed some of the music for the game's mini games from the Legacy Console editions. Rosenfeld had stated his intent to create a third album of music for the game in a 2015 interview with Fact, and confirmed its existence in a 2017 tweet, stating that his work on the record as of then had tallied up to be longer than the previous two albums combined, which in total clocks in at over 3 hours and 18 minutes. However, due to licensing issues with Microsoft, the third volume has since not seen release. On 8 January 2021, Rosenfeld was asked in an interview with Anthony Fantano whether or not there was still a third volume of his music intended for release. Rosenfeld responded, saying, "I have something—I consider it finished—but things have become complicated, especially as Minecraft is now a big property, so I don't know." Reception Minecraft has received critical acclaim, with praise for the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay. Critics have expressed enjoyment in Minecraft's complex crafting system, commenting that it is an important aspect of the game's open-ended gameplay. Most publications were impressed by the game's "blocky" graphics, with IGN describing them as "instantly memorable". Reviewers also liked the game's adventure elements, noting that the game creates a good balance between exploring and building. The game's multiplayer feature has been generally received favorably, with IGN commenting that "adventuring is always better with friends". Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer said Minecraft is "intuitively interesting and contagiously fun, with an unparalleled scope for creativity and memorable experiences". It has been regarded as having introduced millions of children to the digital world, insofar as its basic game mechanics are logically analogous to computer commands. IGN was disappointed about the troublesome steps needed to set up multiplayer servers, calling it a "hassle". Critics also said that visual glitches occur periodically. Despite its release out of beta in 2011, GameSpot said the game had an "unfinished feel", adding that some game elements seem "incomplete or thrown together in haste". A review of the alpha version, by Scott Munro of the Daily Record, called it "already something special" and urged readers to buy it. Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun also recommended the alpha of the game, calling it "a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker". On 17 September 2010, gaming webcomic Penny Arcade began a series of comics and news posts about the addictiveness of the game. The Xbox 360 version was generally received positively by critics, but did not receive as much praise as the PC version. Although reviewers were disappointed by the lack of features such as mod support and content from the PC version, they acclaimed the port's addition of a tutorial and in-game tips and crafting recipes, saying that they make the game more user-friendly. The Xbox One Edition was one of the best received ports, being praised for its relatively large worlds. The PlayStation 3 Edition also received generally favorable reviews, being compared to the Xbox 360 Edition and praised for its well-adapted controls. The PlayStation 4 edition was the best received port to date, being praised for having 36 times larger worlds than the PlayStation 3 edition and described as nearly identical to the Xbox One edition. The PlayStation Vita Edition received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for its technical limitations. The Wii U version received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for a lack of GamePad integration. The 3DS version received mixed reviews, being criticized for its high price, technical issues, and lack of cross-platform play. The Nintendo Switch Edition received fairly positive reviews from critics, being praised, like other modern ports, for its relatively larger worlds. Minecraft: Pocket Edition initially received mixed reviews from critics. Although reviewers appreciated the game's intuitive controls, they were disappointed by the lack of content. The inability to collect resources and craft items, as well as the limited types of blocks and lack of hostile mobs, were especially criticized. After updates added more content, Pocket Edition started receiving more positive reviews. Reviewers complimented the controls and the graphics, but still noted a lack of content. Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made €23 million (US$33 million) in revenue, with 800,000 sales of the alpha version of the game, and over 1 million sales of the beta version. In November 2011, prior to the game's full release, Minecraft beta surpassed 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases. By March 2012, Minecraft had become the 6th best-selling PC game of all time. As of 10 October 2014[update], the game had sold 17 million copies on PC, becoming the best-selling PC game of all time. On 25 February 2014, the game reached 100 million registered users. By May 2019, 180 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the single best-selling video game of all time. The free-to-play Minecraft China version had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. By 2023, the game had sold over 300 million copies. As of April 2025, Minecraft has sold over 350 million copies. The Xbox 360 version of Minecraft became profitable within the first day of the game's release in 2012, when the game broke the Xbox Live sales records with 400,000 players online. Within a week of being on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Minecraft sold a million copies. GameSpot announced in December 2012 that Minecraft sold over 4.48 million copies since the game debuted on Xbox Live Arcade in May 2012. In 2012, Minecraft was the most purchased title on Xbox Live Arcade; it was also the fourth most played title on Xbox Live based on average unique users per day. As of 4 April 2014[update], the Xbox 360 version has sold 12 million copies. In addition, Minecraft: Pocket Edition has reached a figure of 21 million in sales. The PlayStation 3 Edition sold one million copies in five weeks. The release of the game's PlayStation Vita version boosted Minecraft sales by 79%, outselling both PS3 and PS4 debut releases and becoming the largest Minecraft launch on a PlayStation console. The PS Vita version sold 100,000 digital copies in Japan within the first two months of release, according to an announcement by SCE Japan Asia. By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of Minecraft were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version. As of 2022, the Vita version has sold over 1.65 million physical copies in Japan, making it the best-selling Vita game in the country. Minecraft helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second quarter. The game, including all of its versions, had over 112 million monthly active players by September 2019. On its 11th anniversary in May 2020, the company announced that Minecraft had reached over 200 million copies sold across platforms with over 126 million monthly active players. By April 2021, the number of active monthly users had climbed to 140 million. In July 2010, PC Gamer listed Minecraft as the fourth-best game to play at work. In December of that year, Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for Best Downloadable Game of 2010, Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun named it the "game of the year". Indie DB awarded the game the 2010 Indie of the Year award as chosen by voters, in addition to two out of five Editor's Choice awards for Most Innovative and Best Singleplayer Indie. It was also awarded Game of the Year by PC Gamer UK. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards at the March 2011 Independent Games Festival and won the Grand Prize and the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011, Minecraft won awards in the categories for Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game and Innovation Award, winning every award for which it was nominated. It also won GameCity's video game arts award. On 5 May 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on 16 March 2012. At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and was nominated in the Best PC Game category. In 2012, at the British Academy Video Games Awards, Minecraft was nominated in the GAME Award of 2011 category and Persson received The Special Award. In 2012, Minecraft XBLA was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the Best Downloadable Game category, and a TIGA Games Industry Award in the Best Arcade Game category. In 2013, it was nominated as the family game of the year at the British Academy Video Games Awards. During the 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft for "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year". Minecraft Console Edition won the award for TIGA Game Of The Year in 2014. In 2015, the game placed 6th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. In 2016, Minecraft placed 6th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Minecraft was nominated for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite App, but lost to Temple Run. It was nominated for the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite Video Game, but lost to Just Dance 2014. The game later won the award for the Most Addicting Game at the 2015 Kids' Choice Awards. In addition, the Java Edition was nominated for "Favorite Video Game" at the 2018 Kids' Choice Awards, while the game itself won the "Still Playing" award at the 2019 Golden Joystick Awards, as well as the "Favorite Video Game" award at the 2020 Kids' Choice Awards. Minecraft also won "Stream Game of the Year" at inaugural Streamer Awards in 2021. The game later garnered a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award nomination for Favorite Video Game in 2021, and won the same category in 2022 and 2023. At the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, it won the Still Playing Award - PC and Console. Minecraft has been subject to several notable controversies. In June 2014, Mojang announced that it would begin enforcing the portion of Minecraft's end-user license agreement (EULA) which prohibits servers from giving in-game advantages to players in exchange for donations or payments. Spokesperson Owen Hill stated that servers could still require players to pay a fee to access the server and could sell in-game cosmetic items. The change was supported by Persson, citing emails he received from parents of children who had spent hundreds of dollars on servers. The Minecraft community and server owners protested, arguing that the EULA's terms were more broad than Mojang was claiming, that the crackdown would force smaller servers to shut down for financial reasons, and that Mojang was suppressing competition for its own Minecraft Realms subscription service. The controversy contributed to Notch's decision to sell Mojang. In 2020, Mojang announced an eventual change to the Java Edition to require a login from a Microsoft account rather than a Mojang account, the latter of which would be sunsetted. This also required Java Edition players to create Xbox network Gamertags. Mojang defended the move to Microsoft accounts by saying that improved security could be offered, including two-factor authentication, blocking cyberbullies in chat, and improved parental controls. The community responded with intense backlash, citing various technical difficulties encountered in the process and how account migration would be mandatory, even for those who do not play on servers. As of 10 March 2022, Microsoft required that all players migrate in order to maintain access the Java Edition of Minecraft. Mojang announced a deadline of 19 September 2023 for account migration, after which all legacy Mojang accounts became inaccessible and unable to be migrated. In June 2022, Mojang added a player-reporting feature in Java Edition. Players could report other players on multiplayer servers for sending messages prohibited by the Xbox Live Code of Conduct; report categories included profane language,[l] substance abuse, hate speech, threats of violence, and nudity. If a player was found to be in violation of Xbox Community Standards, they would be banned from all servers for a specific period of time or permanently. The update containing the report feature (1.19.1) was released on 27 July 2022. Mojang received substantial backlash and protest from community members, one of the most common complaints being that banned players would be forbidden from joining any server, even private ones. Others took issue to what they saw as Microsoft increasing control over its player base and exercising censorship, leading some to start a hashtag #saveminecraft and dub the version "1.19.84", a reference to the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The "Mob Vote" was an online event organized by Mojang in which the Minecraft community voted between three original mob concepts; initially, the winning mob was to be implemented in a future update, while the losing mobs were scrapped, though after the first mob vote this was changed, and losing mobs would now have a chance to come to the game in the future. The first Mob Vote was held during Minecon Earth 2017 and became an annual event starting with Minecraft Live 2020. The Mob Vote was often criticized for forcing players to choose one mob instead of implementing all three, causing divisions and flaming within the community, and potentially allowing internet bots and Minecraft content creators with large fanbases to conduct vote brigading. The Mob Vote was also blamed for a perceived lack of new content added to Minecraft since Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang in 2014. The 2023 Mob Vote featured three passive mobs—the crab, the penguin, and the armadillo—with voting scheduled to start on 13 October. In response, a Change.org petition was created on 6 October, demanding that Mojang eliminate the Mob Vote and instead implement all three mobs going forward. The petition received approximately 445,000 signatures by 13 October and was joined by calls to boycott the Mob Vote, as well as a partially tongue-in-cheek "revolutionary" propaganda campaign in which sympathizers created anti-Mojang and pro-boycott posters in the vein of real 20th century propaganda posters. Mojang did not release an official response to the boycott, and the Mob Vote otherwise proceeded normally, with the armadillo winning the vote. In September 2024, as part of a blog post detailing their future plans for Minecraft's development, Mojang announced the Mob Vote would be retired. Cultural impact In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of the 21st century to date, and in November 2019, Polygon called it the "most important game of the decade" in its 2010s "decade in review". In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft. Research conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs. Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded. The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube's gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform. By 2018, it was still YouTube's biggest game globally. Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a now-defunct gaming video company that owned a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube. The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance. Another well-known YouTube personality is Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, who has also created many Minecraft music parodies, including "Revenge", a parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love". Minecraft's popularity on YouTube was described by Polygon as quietly dominant, although in 2019, thanks in part to PewDiePie's playthroughs of the game, Minecraft experienced a visible uptick in popularity on the platform. Longer-running series include Far Lands or Bust, dedicated to reaching the obsolete "Far Lands" glitch by foot on an older version of the game. YouTube announced that on 14 December 2021 that the total amount of Minecraft-related views on the website had exceeded one trillion. Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, and FTL: Faster Than Light. Minecraft is officially represented in downloadable content for the crossover fighter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Steve as a playable character with a moveset including references to building, crafting, and redstone, alongside an Overworld-themed stage. It was also referenced by electronic music artist Deadmau5 in his performances. The game is also referenced heavily in "Informative Murder Porn", the second episode of the seventeenth season of the animated television series South Park. In 2025, A Minecraft Movie was released. It made $313 million in the box office in the first week, a record-breaking opening for a video game adaptation. Minecraft has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as many of the generation's members played the game at a young age. The possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design (CAD) and education. In a panel at Minecon 2011, a Swedish developer discussed the possibility of using the game to redesign public buildings and parks, stating that rendering using Minecraft was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of new buildings and parks. In 2012, a member of the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab, Cody Sumter, said: "Notch hasn't just built a game. He's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program." Various software has been developed to allow virtual designs to be printed using professional 3D printers or personal printers such as MakerBot and RepRap. In September 2012, Mojang began the Block by Block project in cooperation with UN Habitat to create real-world environments in Minecraft. The project allows young people who live in those environments to participate in designing the changes they would like to see. Using Minecraft, the community has helped reconstruct the areas of concern, and citizens are invited to enter the Minecraft servers and modify their own neighborhood. Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016." Mojang signed Minecraft building community, FyreUK, to help render the environments into Minecraft. The first pilot project began in Kibera, one of Nairobi's informal settlements and is in the planning phase. The Block by Block project is based on an earlier initiative started in October 2011, Mina Kvarter (My Block), which gave young people in Swedish communities a tool to visualize how they wanted to change their part of town. According to Manneh, the project was a helpful way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having a training in architecture. The ideas presented by the citizens were a template for political decisions. In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency generated all of Denmark in fullscale in Minecraft based on their own geodata. This is possible because Denmark is one of the flattest countries with the highest point at 171 meters (ranking as the country with the 30th smallest elevation span), where the limit in default Minecraft was around 192 meters above in-game sea level when the project was completed. Taking advantage of the game's accessibility where other websites are censored, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders has used an open Minecraft server to create the Uncensored Library, a repository within the game of journalism by authors from countries (including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam) who have been censored and arrested, such as Jamal Khashoggi. The neoclassical virtual building was created over about 250 hours by an international team of 24 people. Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft speedrunning, where players time themselves from spawning into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss, is popular. Some speedrunners use a combination of mods, external programs, and debug menus, while other runners play the game in a more vanilla or more consistency-oriented way. Minecraft has been used in educational settings through initiatives such as MinecraftEdu, founded in 2011 to make the game affordable and accessible for schools in collaboration with Mojang. MinecraftEdu provided features allowing teachers to monitor student progress, including screenshot submissions as evidence of lesson completion, and by 2012 reported that approximately 250,000 students worldwide had access to the platform. Mojang also developed Minecraft: Education Edition with pre-built lesson plans for up to 30 students in a closed environment. Educators have used Minecraft to teach subjects such as history, language arts, and science through custom-built environments, including reconstructions of historical landmarks and large-scale models of biological structures such as animal cells. The introduction of redstone blocks enabled the construction of functional virtual machines such as a hard drive and an 8-bit computer. Mods have been created to use these mechanics for teaching programming. In 2014, the British Museum announced a project to reproduce its building and exhibits in Minecraft in collaboration with the public. Microsoft and Code.org have offered Minecraft-based tutorials and activities designed to teach programming, reporting by 2018 that more than 85 million children had used their resources. In 2025, the Musée de Minéralogie in Paris held a temporary exhibition titled "Minerals in Minecraft." Following the initial surge in popularity of Minecraft in 2010, other video games were criticised for having various similarities to Minecraft, and some were described as being "clones", often due to a direct inspiration from Minecraft, or a superficial similarity. Examples include Ace of Spades, CastleMiner, CraftWorld, FortressCraft, Terraria, BlockWorld 3D, Total Miner, and Luanti (formerly Minetest). David Frampton, designer of The Blockheads, reported that one failure of his 2D game was the "low resolution pixel art" that too closely resembled the art in Minecraft, which resulted in "some resistance" from fans. A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system. In response to Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and their Minecraft IP, various developers announced further clone titles developed specifically for Nintendo's consoles, as they were the only major platforms not to officially receive Minecraft at the time. These clone titles include UCraft (Nexis Games), Cube Life: Island Survival (Cypronia), Discovery (Noowanda), Battleminer (Wobbly Tooth Games), Cube Creator 3D (Big John Games), and Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games). Despite this, the fears of fans were unfounded, with official Minecraft releases on Nintendo consoles eventually resuming. Markus Persson made another similar game, Minicraft, for a Ludum Dare competition in 2011. In 2025, Persson announced through a poll on his X account that he was considering developing a spiritual successor to Minecraft. He later clarified that he was "100% serious", and that he had "basically announced Minecraft 2". Within days, however, Persson cancelled the plans after speaking to his team. In November 2024, artificial intelligence companies Decart and Etched released Oasis, an artificially generated version of Minecraft, as a proof of concept. Every in-game element is completely AI-generated in real time and the model does not store world data, leading to "hallucinations" such as items and blocks appearing that were not there before. In January 2026, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest that year. On 10 February, Mojang issued a DMCA takedown of Allumeria on Steam through Valve, alleging the game was infringing on Minecraft's copyright. Some reports suggested that the takedown may have used an automatic AI copyright claiming service. The DMCA was later withdrawn. Minecon was an annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first full Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes; exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community. In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual "Minecon Earth" livestreams on minecraft.net and YouTube instead. These livestreams, later rebranded to "Minecraft Live", included the mob/biome votes, and announcements of new game updates. In 2025, "Minecraft Live" became a biannual event as part of Minecraft's changing update schedule.[citation needed] Notes References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2019-01-28-diversity-fellowships.html] | [TOKENS: 1444] |
fast.ai Diversity Fellows and Sponsors Wanted Rachel Thomas January 28, 2019 This post was originally published on 2018-08-16, but has been updated for the newest, upcoming course. At fast.ai, we want to do our part to increase diversity in deep learning and to lower the unnecessary barriers to entry for everyone. We are providing diversity scholarships for our updated part-time, in-person Deep Learning for Coders part 2 course presented in partnership with the University of San Francisco Data Institute, to be offered one evening per week for 7 weeks, starting March 18, 2019, in downtown San Francisco. Women, people of Color, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and/or veterans are eligible to apply. We are still looking for additional financial sponsors, so please contact [email protected] if your company is interested in donating. The deadline to apply is February 14, 2019. Details on how to apply, and FAQ, are at the end of this post. What can you do with deep learning? Deep learning has great potential for good. It is being used by fast.ai students and teachers to diagnose cancer, stop deforestation of endangered rain-forests, provide better crop insurance to farmers in India (who otherwise have to take predatory loans from thugs, which have led to high suicide rates), help Urdu speakers in Pakistan, detect udder infections in goats and cows, develop wearable devices for patients with Parkinson’s disease, and much more. Deep learning could address the global shortage of doctors, provide more accurate medical diagnoses, improve energy efficiency, increase farm yields, and reduce pesticide use. However, there is also great potential for harm. We are worried about unethical uses of data science, and about the ways that society’s racial and gender biases (summary here) are being encoded into our machine learning systems. We are concerned that an extremely homogeneous group is building technology that impacts everyone. People can’t address problems that they’re not aware of, and with more diverse practitioners, a wider variety of important societal problems will be tackled. We want to get deep learning into the hands of as many people as possible, from as many diverse backgrounds as possible. People with different backgrounds have different problems they’re interested in solving. The traditional approach is to start with an AI expert and then give them a problem to work on; at fast.ai we want people who are knowledgeable and passionate about the problems they are working on, and we’ll teach them the deep learning they need. In my TEDx talk, I shared how my unlikely background led me to the work I do now and why we need more people with unlikely backgrounds in the field, both to address misuses of AI, as well as to take full advantage of the positive opportunities. While some people worry that it’s risky for more people to have access to AI; I believe the opposite. We’ve already seen the harm wreaked by elite and exclusive companies such as Facebook, Palantir, and YouTube/Google. Getting people from a wider range of backgrounds involved can help us address these problems. The fast.ai approach We began fast.ai with an experiment: to see if we could teach deep learning to coders, with no math pre-requisites beyond high school math, and get them to state-of-the-art results in just 7 weeks. This was very different from other deep learning materials, many of which assume a graduate level math background, focus on theory, only work on toy problems, and don’t even include the practical tips. We didn’t even know if what we were attempting was possible, but the fast.ai course has been a huge success! Fast.ai students have been accepted to the launched companies, won hackathons, invented a new fraud detection algorithm, had work featured on the HBO TV show Silicon Valley, and more, all from taking a course that has only one year of coding experience as the pre-requisite. fast.ai is not just an educational resource; we also do cutting-edge research and have achieved state-of-the-art results. Our wins (and here) in Stanford’s DAWNBench competition against much better funded teams from Google and Intel were covered in the MIT Tech Review and the Verge. Jeremy’s work with Sebastian Ruder achieving state-of-the art on 6 language classification datasets was accepted by ACL, has been built upon by OpenAI and Google Brain; and was featured in the New York Times. All this research is incorporated into our course, teaching students state-of-the-art techniques. How to Sponsor We are looking for additional companies to sponsor diversity fellowships. Please contact Mindi [email protected] if your company might be interested! Who is eligible for a diversity fellowship? Wondering if you’re qualified? The requirements are: You can fulfill the requirement to be familiar with deep learning, the fastai library, and PyTorch by doing any 1 of the following: Deep Learning Part 1 covers the use of deep learning for image recognition, recommendation systems, sentiment analysis, and time-series prediction. Part 2 will take this further by teaching you how to read and implement cutting edge research papers, generative models and other advanced architectures, and more in-depth natural language processing. As with all fast.ai courses, it will be practical, state-of-the-art, and geared towards coders. How to Apply for a Fellowship The number of scholarships we are able to offer depends on how much funding we receive (if your organization may be able to sponsor one or more places, please let us know). To apply for the fellowship, you will need to submit a resume and statement of purpose. The statement of purpose will include the following: Diversity Fellowship applications should be submitted here: https://certificate.usfca.edu/register/di-application If you have any questions, please email [email protected]. The deadline to apply is February 14, 2019. FAQ I’m not eligible for the diversity scholarship, but I’m still interested. Can I take the course? Absolutely! You can register here. I don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area; can I participate remotely? Yes! Stay tuned for details to be released in a blog post in the next few weeks. Will this course be made available online later? Yes, this course will be made freely available online afterwards. Benefits of taking the in-person course include earlier access, community and in-person interaction, and more structure (for those that struggle with motivation when taking online courses). Is fast.ai able to sponsor visas or provide stipends for living expenses? No, we are not able to sponsor visas nor to cover living expenses. How will this course differ from the previous fast.ai courses? Our goal at fast.ai is to push the state-of-the-art. Each year, we want to make deep learning increasingly intuitive to use while giving better results. With our fastai library, we are beating our own state-of-the-art results from last year. What language is the course taught in? The course is taught in Python, using the fastai library and PyTorch. Some of our students have gone on to use the fastai library in production at Fortune 500 companies. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_education] | [TOKENS: 1715] |
Contents Artificial intelligence in education Artificial intelligence in education (often abbreviated as AIEd) is a subfield of educational technology that studies how to use artificial intelligence, such as generative AI chatbots, to create learning environments. Considerations in the field include data-driven decision-making, AI ethics, data privacy and AI literacy. Concerns include the potential for cheating, over-reliance, equity of access, reduced critical thinking, and the perpetuation of misinformation and bias. History Efforts to integrate AI into educational contexts have often followed technological advancement in the history of artificial intelligence. In the 1960s, educators and researchers began developing computer-based instruction systems, such as PLATO, developed by the University of Illinois. In the 1970s and 1980s, intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) were being adapted for classroom instruction. The International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society was founded in 1993. In the late 2010s and 2020s, large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI technologies have become focuses of AIEd conversations. During this time, AI content detectors have been developed and employed to detect and/or punish unsanctioned AI use in educational contexts, although their accuracy is limited. Some schools banned LLMs, but many bans were later lifted. Theory AIEd applies theory from education studies, machine learning, and related fields. One posited model suggests the following three paradigms for AI in education, which follow roughly from least to most learner-centered and from requiring least to most technical complexity from the AI systems: AI-Directed, Learner-as-recipient: AIEd systems present a pre-set curriculum based on statistical patterns that do not adjust to learner's feedback. AI-Supported, Learner-as-collaborator: Systems that incorporate responsiveness to learner's feedback through, for example, natural language processing, wherein AI can support knowledge construction. AI-Empowered, Learner-as-leader: This model seeks to position AI as a supplement to human intelligence wherein learners take agency and AI provides consistent and actionable feedback. Some scholars frame AI in education within the concept of the socio-technical imaginary, defined as collective visions and aspirations that shape societal transformations and governance through the interplay of technology and social norms. This framing positions AI in the history of “emerging technologies” that have and will transform education, such as computing, the internet, or social media. Emerging theoretical frameworks in AIEd draw on new materialism and post-humanism, specifically Donna Haraway's concept of sympoiesis (making-with). This perspective views learning as an entanglement of human and non-human actors (students, teachers, and AI algorithms), where knowledge is co-composed in contact zones between human context and algorithmic prediction. Applications AI-based tutoring systems, or intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), in the 1970s with systems such as SCHOLAR. These systems are designed to offer an interaction between a student and a simulated teacher. Adaptive learning is a methodology that uses computer algorithms and machine learning to organize customized educational resources and activities. These systems, often called Adaptive Learning Platforms (ALPs), attempt to analyze a student's performance, behavior, and prior knowledge. ALPs function by creating and maintaining a student model, which tracks individual progress, knowledge gaps, and preferred learning styles. They use predictive analytics to forecast potential areas of struggle and automatically intervene by adjusting the difficulty, pace, or format of the educational content. For example, if a student quickly masters a concept, the system accelerates the pace or introduces more complex topics. Conversely, if a student struggles, the platform provides feedback or offers supplementary materials like videos or interactive simulations. ALPs has shown positive results in improving academic outcomes and test scores, student engagement, and motivation. Uses of generative AI chatbots in education have included assessment and feedback, machine translations, proof-reading and copy editing, or as virtual assistants. Emotional AI in education is the study and development of systems that can detect learners’ emotions and provide emotional support. Perspectives The AI in education community has grown rapidly in the global north, driven by venture capital, big tech, and open educationalists. In the 2020s, companies who create AI services are targeting students and educational institutions as consumers and enterprise partners. Similarly, pre-AI boom educational companies are expanding their AI integration or AI-powered services. These commercial incentives for AIEd innovation may be related to a potential AI bubble. In the U.S., bipartisan support of AI development in K-12 education has been expressed, but specific implementations and best practices remain contentious. Starting in the 2020s, higher-education institutions have begun to develop guidelines and policies to account for AI. Governmental and non-governmental organizations such as UNESCO, Article 4 of the European Union's AI Act, and the U.S. Department of Education have published reports advocating for specific AIEd approaches. In 2024, UNESCO released updated global guidance for generative AI in education, emphasizing ethical use, teacher training, and data protection to ensure responsible integration of AI tools in learning environments. Policy implementation in higher education often faces challenges related to ambiguity as it is interpreted and enacted differently by various stakeholders. Research indicates that decentralized policies can lead to inconsistent enforcement and confusion among students regarding what constitutes acceptable use, with the burden of ethical navigation falling on individual teachers and students. Research and reporting from 2024 onward suggest that the number of higher education instructors using LLMs for grading, research, and/or curricular design has increased. However, studies indicate that many pre-service teachers remain hesitant about widespread AI adoption due to concerns about reliability, bias, and insufficient preparation. These findings highlight the need for stronger AI literacy training in teacher preparation programs. Reporting has indicated that students' use of AI in higher education has been increasing since 2022 and is relatively commonplace. The evidence suggests students believe their college education has been changed rather than "ruined" by AI and that they want instructors and themselves to have ongoing AI guidance. In September 2025, The Atlantic published an op-ed from a high school senior arguing that the normalization of AI cheating was eroding critical thinking, academic integrity, creativity, and the shared student experience. Challenges and ethical concerns The advancement and adoption of AI in education comes with criticisms and ethical challenges. Some critics believe that reliance on the technology could lead students to develop less creativity, critical thinking, and/or problem-solving abilities. Reliance on generative AI has been linked with reduced academic self-esteem and performance, and heightened learned helplessness. Algorithm errors and hallucinations are common flaws in AI agents, making them less trustworthy and reliable. These limitations underscore concerns regarding academic integrity, skill development, and information accuracy regarding AI use in academic settings. A major gap in current AI-in-education research is the limited focus on educators’ needs and perspectives. A review of over a decade of studies found that most research prioritizes technological design over pedagogical integration, underscoring the need for deeper collaboration between computer scientists and educators. While AIEd technologies may be able to improve an individual user's access to education by serving as an assistive technology, the proliferation or need for AI in education continues to raise concerns about equal access to technology. For example, lower-income or rural areas may have more limited access to the computing hardware or paid software subscriptions needed for AIEd platform use. This might widen the digital divide or create further gaps in terms of access to education. Some AIEd practitioners believe that global efforts should be made towards increasing accessibility and training educators to serve underprivileged areas. AI agents might be trained on biased data sets, and thus continue to perpetuate societal biases. Since LLMs were created to produce human-like text, algorithmic bias can easily and unintentionally be introduced and reproduced. Some critics also argue that AI's data processing and monitoring reinforce neoliberal approaches to education rather than addressing inequalities. Data privacy and intellectual property are further ethical concerns of AIEd. Contemporary LLMs are trained on datasets that are often proprietary and may contain copyrighted or theoretically private materials (e.g. personal emails). AI integration in classrooms has created new forms of invisible labour for educators, who must navigate ambiguous policies, redesign assessments to be AI-resilient, and adjudicate potential academic integrity violations. The use of AI detection tools has also been criticised for creating an adversarial relationship between students and institutions, where students may be falsely accused of misconduct based on probabilistic software. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_architecture] | [TOKENS: 1495] |
Contents Artificial intelligence in architecture Artificial intelligence in architecture is the use of artificial intelligence in automation, design, and planning in the architectural process or in assisting human skills in the field of architecture. AI has been used by some architects for design, and has been proposed as a way to automate planning and routine tasks in the field. Implications Artificial intelligence, according to ArchDaily, is said to potentially significantly augment the architectural profession through its ability to improve the design and planning process as well as increasing productivity. Through its ability to handle a large amount of data, AI is said to potentially allow architects a range of design choices with criteria considerations such as budget, requirements adjusted to space, and sustainability goals calculated as part of the design process. ArchDaily said this may allow the design of optimized alternatives that can then undergo human review. AI tools are also said to potentially allow architects to assimilate urban and environmental data to inform their designs, streamlining initial stages of project planning and increasing efficiency and productivity. The advances in generative design through the input of specific prompts allow architects to produce visual designs, including photorealistic images, and thus render and explore various material choices and spatial configurations. ArchDaily noted this could speed the creative process as well as allow for experimentation and sophistication in the design. Additionally, AI's capacity for pattern recognition and coding could aid architects in organizing design resources and developing custom applications, thus enhancing the efficiency and the collaboration between both architects and AI. AI is thought to also be able to contribute to the sustainability of buildings by analyzing various factors and following recommended energy-efficient modifications, thus pushing the industry towards greener practices. The use of AI in building maintenance, project management, and the creation of immersive virtual reality experiences are also thought of as potentially augmenting the architectural design process and workflow. Examples include the use of text-to-image systems such as Midjourney to create detailed architectural images, and the use of AI optimization systems from companies such as Finch3D and Autodesk to automatically generate floor plans from simple programmatic inputs. In contrast to digital-only creative practices, the high materiality of architectural outputs requires transitions from ephemeral digital files to permanent physical structures that are subject to strict safety regulations, material constraints, sensory intuition, and site-specific cultural contexts, making full automation difficult. Early adopters such as architect Stephen Coorlas have actively challenged the boundaries of architectural practice through AI. His early experimental initiative, Speculations on AI and Architecture, confronts the discipline's traditional workflows by training text-to-image AI tools such as Midjourney, Luma AI, and PromeAI to generate more nuanced architectural illustrations including construction documents, architectural details, and assembly sequences for various structures. Coorlas inputs precise terminology and architectural language to provoke the AI into producing axonometric drawings that resemble conventional documentation, then experiments with animating the outputs using AI generated depth maps and other AI image-to-3D wireframe tools. Stephen's inventive process invites architects and designers to reconsider authorship, automation, and the future of visual communication in the built environment. Rather than treating AI as a peripheral tool, Stephen has advocated for AI to be a speculative collaborator capable of engaging with discipline-specific challenges. His work contributes to the growing discourse on generative design, parametric optimization, and the philosophical implications of machine-assisted creativity raising urgent questions about how such technologies will reshape architectural agency, precision, and pedagogy. Another prominent advocate is Architect Andrew Kudless, who in an interview to Dezeen recounted that he uses AI to innovate in architectural design by incorporating materials and scenes not usually present in initial plans, which he believes can significantly alter client presentations. He told Dezeen he believes one should show clients renderings from the onset, with AI assisting in this work, arguing that changes in design should be a positive aspect of the client-designer relationship by actively involving clients in the process. Additionally, Kudless highlighted the AI's potential to facilitate labor in architectural firms, particularly in automating rendering tasks, thus reducing the workload on junior staff while maintaining control over the creative output. In an interview for the AItopia series to Dezeen, designer Tim Fu discussed the transformative potential of AI in architecture, and proposed a future where AI could herald a "neoclassical futurist" style, blending the grandeur of classical aesthetics with futuristic design. Through his collaborative project, The AI Stone Carver, Fu showcased how AI can innovate traditional practices by generating design concepts that are then realized through human craftsmanship, such as stone carving by mason Till Apfel. This approach, he believed, celebrated the fusion of diverse architectural styles and also emphasized the unique capabilities of AI in enhancing creative design processes. Fu told Dezeen he envisions the integration of AI in design as a means to revive the ornamentation and detailed aesthetics characteristic of classical architecture, moving away from the minimalism, which he said dominates contemporary architecture. He argued that AI's involvement in the ideation phase of design allows for a reversal in the roles of machine and human, enabling architects and designers to focus on creating more intricate and ornamental structures. Fu's optimistic outlook extended to the broader impact of AI on the architectural field, seeing it as an indispensable tool that will shift rather than replace human roles, enriching the field with innovative designs that pay homage to the beauty and qualities of classical architecture not present in contemporary architecture while embracing new technologies. This perspective resonates with designers like Manas Bhatia, whose explorations similarly embrace generative AI as a co-creator and a medium to express ideas, blend architectural traditions, and speculate spatial futures. As AI continues to expand its presence across various industries, its impact on the architectural profession has become a topic of growing discussion. These discussions focus on how AI processes may influence traditional architectural practices, potentially altering job roles, and shaping the nature of creativity. While AI-driven processes may increase efficiency in some aspects of the profession, they also raise questions about the potential loss of unique design perspectives. These thoughts have been countered by many prominent creative figures in the realm of AI architecture, such as Stephen Coorlas, Tim Fu, Hassan Ragab, and Manas Bhatia who have showcased the amplification of creativity in design and potential benefits in terms of restoring creative power to the designer. A key concern is that AI-powered tools could diminish the need for human involvement in specific tasks traditionally performed by architects. This has led to speculation that the profession may increasingly shift toward roles focused on oversight, coordination, and strategic decision-making rather than hands-on design work. In some design scenarios, algorithmically generated solutions can be adjusted to prioritize efficiency and cost-effectiveness, which some argue may overshadow the creative and contextual nuances that define individual architectural styles. As with any discipline though, it has been determined that AI can be configured to provide beneficial results based on inputs and end goals the architect or designer assigns it. There are also concerns about the potential for AI to exacerbate inequalities within the architectural profession. For instance, larger firms with greater resources to invest in advanced AI technologies may gain a competitive edge over smaller firms and independent architects. This dynamic could contribute to industry consolidation, potentially limiting the diversity of architectural practice and stifling innovation. Ethical considerations in regard to cultural sensitivity have also been raised due to the datasets used to train AI. Without proper vetting of data or implementing failsafe overrides, AI generated outcomes can trend toward overly documented and prioritized content. References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#cite_ref-TechRadar:_History_18-4] | [TOKENS: 3525] |
Contents Markus Persson Markus Alexej Persson (/ˈpɪərsən/ ⓘ PEER-sən, Swedish: [ˈmǎrːkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ⓘ; born 1 June 1979), known by the pseudonym Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is the creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history. He founded the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson began developing video games at an early age. His commercial success began after he published an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over four million copies. After this point Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred his creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014 Persson announced his intention to leave Mojang, and in November of that year the company was sold to Microsoft reportedly for US$2.5 billion, which made him a billionaire. Since 2016 several of Persson's posts on Twitter regarding feminism, race, and transgender rights have caused public controversies. He has been described as "an increasingly polarizing figure, tweeting offensive statements regarding race, the LGBTQ community, gender, and other topics." In an effort to distance itself from Persson, Microsoft removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration. In 2015 he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain, which was relaunched in 2024 as Bitshift Entertainment. Early life Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother, Ritva, and a Swedish father, Birger, on 1 June 1979. He has one sister. He grew up in Edsbyn until he was seven years old, when his family moved back to Stockholm. In Edsbyn, Persson's father worked for the railroad, and his mother was a nurse. He spent much time outdoors in Edsbyn, exploring the woods with his friends. When Persson was about seven years old, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with their mother. His father moved to a cabin in the countryside. Persson said in an interview that they experienced food insecurity around once a month. Persson lost contact with his father for several years after the divorce. According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies. While his father had somewhat recovered during Persson's early life, his father relapsed, contributing to the divorce. His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home. He had gained interest in video games at an early age. His father was "a really big nerd", who built his own modem and taught Persson to use the family's Commodore 128. On it, Persson played bootleg games and loaded in various type-in programs from computer magazines with the help of his sister. The first game he purchased with his own money was The Bard's Tale. He began programming on his father's Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven. He produced his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game. By 1994 Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. Persson, although introverted, was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly had only one friend. He spent most of his spare time with games and programming at home. He managed to reverse-engineer the Doom engine, which he continued to take great pride in as of 2014[update]. He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student. Career Persson started his career working as a web designer. He later found employment at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson. The pair worked in their spare time to build the 2006 video game Wurm Online. The game was released through a new entity, "Mojang Specifications AB". Persson left the project in late 2007. As Persson wanted to reuse the name "Mojang", Jansson agreed to rename the company to Onetoofree AB. Between 2004 and 2009 Persson worked as a game developer for Midasplayer (later known as King). There, he worked as a programmer, mostly building browser games made in Flash. He later worked as a programmer for jAlbum. Prior to creating Minecraft, Persson developed multiple, small games. He also entered a number of game design competitions and participated in discussions on the TIGSource forums, a web forum for independent game developers. One of Persson's more notable personal projects was called RubyDung, an isometric three-dimensional base-building game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress. While working on RubyDung, Persson experimented with a first-person view mode similar to that found in Dungeon Keeper. However, he felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode. In 2009 Persson found inspiration in Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game. Infiniminer heavily influenced his future work on RubyDung, and was behind Persson's reasoning for returning the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals to the game. RubyDung is the earliest known Minecraft prototype created by Persson. On 17 May 2009 Persson released the original edition (later called "Classic version") of Minecraft on the TIGSource forums. He regularly updated the game based on feedback from TIGSource users. Persson released several new versions of Minecraft throughout 2009 and 2010, going through several phases of development including Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev. On 30 June 2010 Persson released the game's Alpha version. While working on the pre-Alpha version of Minecraft, Persson continued working at jAlbum. In 2010, after the release and subsequent success of Minecraft's Alpha version, Persson moved from a full-time role to a part-time role at jAlbum. He left jAlbum later that same year. In September 2010 Persson travelled to Valve Corporation's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, United States, where he took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell. Persson was subsequently offered a job at Valve, which he turned down in order to continue work on Minecraft. On 20 December 2010 Minecraft moved into its beta phase and began expanding to other platforms, including mobile. In January 2011 Minecraft reached one million registered accounts. Six months afterwards, it reached ten million. The game has sold over four million copies by 7 November 2011. Mojang held the first Minecon from 18 to 19 November 2011 to celebrate its full release, and subsequently made it an annual event. Following this, on 11 December 2011, Persson transferred creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and began working on another game title, 0x10c, although he reportedly abandoned the project around 2013. In 2013 Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million and profits of $129 million. Persson has stated that, due to the intense media attention and public pressure, he became exhausted with running Minecraft and Mojang. In a September 2014 blog post he shared his realization that he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. In June 2014 Persson tweeted "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig", reportedly partly as a joke. Persson controlled a 71% stake in Mojang at the time. The offer attracted significant interest from Activision Blizzard, EA, and Microsoft. Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted to purchase the game as a "tax dodge" to turn their taxable excess liquid cash into other assets. In September 2014 Microsoft agreed to purchase Mojang for $2.5 billion, making Persson a billionaire. He then left the company after the deal was finalised in November. Since leaving Mojang, Persson has worked on several small projects. On 23 June 2014 he founded a company with Porsér called Rubberbrain AB; the company had no games by 2021, despite spending SEK 60 million. The company was relaunched as Bitshift Entertainment, LLC on 28 March 2024. Persson expressed interest in creating a new video game studio in 2020, and in developing virtual reality games. He has also since created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party()", which uses extensive visual effects and has been hosted in multiple cities. At the beginning of 2025 Persson decided to create a spiritual successor to Minecraft, referred to as "Minecraft 2", in response to the results of a poll on X. However, after speaking to his team, he shortly went against this in favour of developing the other choice on his Twitter poll, a roguelike titled Levers and Chests. Games Persson's most popular creation is the survival sandbox game Minecraft, which was first publicly available on 17 May 2009 and fully released on 18 November 2011. Persson left his job as a game developer to work on Minecraft full-time until completion. In early 2011, Mojang AB sold the one millionth copy of the game, several months later their second, and several more their third. Mojang hired several new staff members for the Minecraft team, while Persson passed the lead developer role to Jens Bergensten. He stopped working on Minecraft after a deal with Microsoft to sell Mojang for $2.5 billion. This brought his net worth to US$1.5 billion. Persson and Jakob Porsér came up with the idea for Scrolls including elements from board games and collectible card games. Persson noted that he will not be actively involved in development of the game and that Porsér will be developing it. Persson revealed on his Tumblr blog on 5 August 2011 that he was being sued by a Swedish law firm representing Bethesda Softworks over the trademarked name of Scrolls, claiming that it conflicted with their The Elder Scrolls series of games. On 17 August 2011 Persson challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome of the naming dispute. On 27 September 2011 Persson confirmed that the lawsuit was going to court. ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda Softworks, announced the lawsuit's settlement in March 2012. The settlement allowed Mojang to continue using the Scrolls trademark. In 2018, Scrolls was made available free of charge and renamed to Caller's Bane. Cliffhorse is a humorous game programmed in two hours using the Unity game engine and free assets. The game took inspiration from Skyrim's physics engine, "the more embarrassing minimum-effort Greenlight games", Goat Simulator, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The game was released to Microsoft Windows systems as an early access and honourware game on the first day of E3 2014, instructing users to donate Dogecoin to "buy" the game before downloading it. The game accumulated over 280,000 dogecoins. Following the end to his involvement with Minecraft, Persson began pre-production of an alternate reality space game set in the distant future in March 2012. On April Fools' Day Mojang launched a satirical website for Mars Effect (parody of Mass Effect), citing the lawsuit with Bethesda as an inspiration. However, the gameplay elements remained true and on 4 April, Mojang revealed 0x10c (pronounced "Ten to the C") as a space sandbox title. Persson officially halted game production in August 2013. However, C418, the composer of the game's soundtrack (as well as that of Minecraft), released an album of the work he had made for the game. In 2013, Persson made a free game called Shambles in the Unity game engine. Persson has also participated in several Ludum Dare 48-hour game making competitions. Personal life In 2011 Persson married Elin Zetterstrand, whom he had dated for four years before. Zetterstrand was a former moderator on the Minecraft forums. They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her. On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce. The divorce was finalised later that year. On 14 December 2011 Persson's father committed suicide with a handgun after drinking heavily. In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father: When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft, he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him. Persson later admitted that he himself suffered from depression and various highs and lows in his mood. Persson has criticised the stance of large game companies on piracy. He once stated that "piracy is not theft", viewing unauthorised downloads as potential future customers. Persson stated himself to be a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden in 2011. He is also a member of Mensa. He has donated to numerous charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle and raised US$458,248 for charity. He also donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2012. In 2011 he gave $3 million in dividends back to Mojang employees. According to Forbes, his net worth in 2023 was around $1.2 billion. In 2014 Persson was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sweden. Around 2014, he lived in a multi-level penthouse in Östermalm, Stockholm, an area he described as "where the rich people live". In December 2014 Persson purchased a home in Trousdale Estates, a neighbourhood in Beverly Hills, California, in the United States, for $70 million, a record sales price for Beverly Hills at the time. Persson reportedly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the property. Persson began receiving criticism for political and social opinions he expressed on social media as early as 2016. November 30, 2017 In 2017, he proposed a heterosexual pride holiday, and wrote that those who opposed the idea "deserve to be shot." After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing, "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now." Later in the year, he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and called the video game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn a "cunt", although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement. He has described intersectional feminism as a "framework for bigotry" and the use of the word mansplaining as being sexist. Also in 2017, Persson tweeted that "It's okay to be white". Later that year, he stated that he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2019, he tweeted referencing QAnon, saying "Q is legit. Don't trust the media." Later in 2019, he tweeted in response to a pro-transgender internet meme that, "You are absolutely evil if you want to encourage delusion. What happened to not stigmatizing mental illness?" He then also promoted claims that people were fined for "using the wrong pronoun". However, after facing backlash, he tweeted a day afterwards that he had "no idea what [being trans is] like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as. Not because it's a cool choice, because it's a big step. I gues [sic] that's actually cool nvm". Later that year, Microsoft removed two mentions of Persson's name in the "19w13a" snapshot of Minecraft and did not invite him to the 10-year anniversary celebration of the game. A spokesperson for Microsoft stated that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang". He is still mentioned in the End Poem ("a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus").[citation needed] Awards References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Eurasia] | [TOKENS: 950] |
Contents Afro-Eurasia Afro-Eurasia (also Afroeurasia and Eurafrasia) is a supercontinent comprising the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. The terms are compound words of the names of its constituent parts. Afro-Eurasia has also been called the "Old World", in contrast to the "New World" referring to the Americas. Afro-Eurasia encompasses 85,135,000 km2 (32,871,000 sq mi), 57% of the world's land area, and has a population of approximately 6.7 billion people, roughly 86% of the world population. Together with mainland Australia, they comprise the vast majority of the land in the world's Eastern Hemisphere. The Afro-Eurasian mainland is the largest and most populous contiguous landmass on Earth. Related terms The following terms are used for similar concepts: Geology Although Afro-Eurasia is typically considered to comprise two or three separate continents, it is not a proper supercontinent. Instead, it is the largest present part of the supercontinent cycle. The oldest part of Afro-Eurasia is probably the Kaapvaal craton, which together with Madagascar and parts of the Indian subcontinent and western Australian continent formed part of the first supercontinent Vaalbara or Ur around 3 billion years ago. It has made up parts of every supercontinent since. At the breakup of Pangaea around 200 million years ago, the North American and Eurasian plates together formed Laurasia while the African plate remained in Gondwana, from which the Indian plate split off. Upon impact with the Eurasian plate, the Indian plate created southern Asia around 50 million years ago and began the formation of the Himalayas. Around the same time, the Indian plate also fused with the Australian plate. The Arabian plate broke off of Africa around 30 million years ago and impacted the Iranian plate between 19 and 12 million years ago during the Miocene, ultimately forming the Alborz and Zagros chains of Iranian plate. After this initial connection of Afro-Eurasia, the Betic corridor along the Gibraltar Arc closed a little less than 6 million years ago in the Messinian, fusing northwest Africa and Iberia together. This led to the nearly complete desiccation of the Mediterranean Basin, the Messinian salinity crisis. Eurasia and Africa were then again separated with the Zanclean Flood around 5.33 million years ago refilling the Mediterranean Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar. Today, the Eurasian plate and African plate dominate their respective continents. However, the Somali plate covers much of eastern Africa, creating the East African Rift. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea plate, Anatolian plate and Arabian plate also form a boundary with the African plate, which incorporates the Sinai Peninsula, Gulf of Aqaba and the coastal Levant via the Dead Sea transform. Eurasia also includes the Indian plate, Burma plate, Sunda plate, Yangtze plate, Amur plate and Okhotsk plate, with the North American plate incorporating the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in the Russian Far East. Conventionally, Africa is joined to Eurasia only by a relatively narrow land bridge (which has been split by the Suez Canal at the Isthmus of Suez) and remains separated from Europe by the straits of Gibraltar and Sicily. Paleogeologist Ronald Blakey has described the next 15 to 100 million years of tectonic development as fairly settled and predictable. In that time, Africa is expected to continue drifting northward. It will close the Strait of Gibraltar, quickly evaporating the Mediterranean Sea. No supercontinent will form within the settled time frame, however, and the geologic record is full of unexpected shifts in tectonic activity that make further projections "very, very speculative". Three possibilities are known as Novopangaea, Amasia, and Pangaea Proxima. In the first two, the Pacific closes and Africa remains fused to Eurasia, but Eurasia itself splits as Africa and Europe spin towards the west; in the last, the trio spin eastward together as the Atlantic closes, creating land borders with the Americas. Extreme points This is a list of the points that are farther north, south, east or west than any other location as well as the highest and lowest elevations on Afro-Eurasia. † The 180th meridian passes through Asia, so this point is in the Western Hemisphere and is Asia’s easternmost point on a continuous path. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_DB] | [TOKENS: 1122] |
Contents Mod DB Mod DB is a website that focuses on general video game modding. It was founded in 2002 by Scott "INtense!" Reismanis. As of September 2015, the Mod DB site has received over 604 million views, has more than 12,500 modifications registered, and has hosted more than 108 million downloads. A spin-off website, Indie DB, was launched in 2010 and focuses on indie games and news. History Scott Reismanis, a website developer from Melbourne, Australia, first pursued web development as a hobby, creating two websites dedicated to video games. Afterwards, he purchased the ChaosRealm.com domain and formed the Realm Network. The network comprised over twenty websites, one of which was Mod DB's predecessor, ModRealm. Launched in 1998, ModRealm was initially dedicated to Counter-Strike cheat codes before becoming a modding website. The website became defunct in December 2001, when its network was shut down after its hosting service, Playnet, filed for bankruptcy. Reismanis was motivated to start a new website by the difficulty of searching for mods on the then-dominant search engine, AltaVista, much less mods released to the public. He began Mod DB's development in January 2002, following IMDb's structure in the process. The website was launched as Mod Database in June 2002. It differed from his earlier websites in that its articles were managed by the community, not only the website's founder. Mod DB rapidly expanded its viewership and database size. In 2006, the Mod DB team launched Addon DB, whose aim was to list additional content for games not applicable under the category of game modifications. This includes models, skins and maps. Just one year into service, it was merged into Mod DB. Reismanis was an information technology consultant at Accenture and intended to keep Mod DB his hobby, but he left the firm to found DesuraNET as the website's hosting company, citing the expense of running the website and his recollection of IGN's 2006 attempt to acquire it. Mod DB was integrated into DesuraNET's Desura, which was a digital distribution service that focused on indie games. The service opened in April 2010 as a competitor to Valve's Steam. Features The purpose of Mod DB is to list the mods, files, tutorials and information of any games that are capable of being modded with user-made content. Community involvement is strongly encouraged, and any game mod with a website is allowed to post a screenshot gallery, news, and requests for help. Scott's intentions, from the beginning, were to get the community heavily involved in the creation and development of the website. To this end, the most active members were chosen as moderators and administrators. The core staff generally remain the same, while lower positions are heavily rotated among trainee moderators, and administrator candidates. The site's staff mostly act as chaperones or librarians, keeping appropriate content available to the public and featuring the more exceptional content.[citation needed] Mod DB has a permissive approach to what content is allowed on the website, but the types of content forbidden by its terms of use include pornographic, defamatory, and obscene content, as well as material that incites crime or hatred, violates intellectual property law under the terms of the copyright law of Australia and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or otherwise "brings [the website] into disrepute."[original research?] Nevertheless, the website received mainstream media attention when in early 2011 it hosted School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, a Half-Life 2 mod in which the player assumes the role of a school student with the goal of murdering as many people as possible before being stopped by police and SWAT members. The mod's premise led to a spate of mail accusing the website of being involved in the project, prompting the website to shut it down in March. Mod of the Year Mod DB's Mod of the Year competition, the Golden Spanner awards, aim to set the industry standard in awarding inventive and high-quality mods. Mods are chosen via a community vote and are then reviewed by staff to produce the final list of winners. The competition aims to encourage all fields of modding, with different categories such as graphics and gameplay, as well as a traditional "best mod" winner. Notable winners include Garry's Mod for Half-Life 2 in 2005, Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat for Half-Life 2 in 2007, Black Mesa for Half-Life in 2012, and Brutal Doom for Doom in 2017. Similarly, Mod DB's Mod Hall of Fame retrospectively reviews mods and inducts what it judges to be the greatest mods of the year of their release. Inductees include PlayerUnknown's Battle Royale for ARMA 3 in 2014. Indie DB is an offshoot of Mod DB launched in June 2010. It is dedicated to indie gaming and serves as a repository for those games. Like Mod DB, the website hosts an annual competition for the best indie game of the year, with the games being voted on in categories and overall. Also like Mod DB, the nominees are selected by the site's editors and voted on by its readers. Winners of the Indie of the Year Awards include Minecraft by Mojang in 2010, RimWorld by Ludeon Studios in 2016 and Ion Fury by Voidpoint in 2019. References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2019-01-23-course-v3.html] | [TOKENS: 2891] |
Practical Deep Learning for Coders 2019 Jeremy Howard January 24, 2019 On this page Launching today, the 2019 edition of Practical Deep Learning for Coders, the third iteration of the course, is 100% new material, including applications that have never been covered by an introductory deep learning course before (with some techniques that haven’t even been published in academic papers yet). There are seven lessons, each around 2 hours long, and you should plan to spend about 10 hours on assignments for each lesson. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have integrated all you need for the courses into their GPU-based platforms, and there are “one-click” platforms available too, such as Crestle and Gradient. The course assumes you have at least a year of coding experience (preferably in Python, although experienced coders will be able to pick Python up as they go; we have a list of python learning resources available), and have completed high-school math (some university-level math is introduced as needed during the course). Many people who have completed the course tell us it takes a lot of work, but it’s one of the most rewarding things they’ve done; we strongly suggest you get involved with the course’s active online community to help you complete your journey. After the first lesson you’ll be able to train a state-of-the-art image classification model on your own data. After completing this lesson, some students from the in-person version of this course (where this material was recorded) published new state-of-the-art results in various domains! The focus for the first half of the course is on practical techniques, showing only the theory required to actually use these techniques in practice. Then, in the second half of the course, we dig deeper and deeper into the theory, until by the final lesson we will build and train a “resnet” neural network from scratch which approaches state-of-the-art accuracy. The key applications covered are: We also cover all the necessary foundations for these applications. We teach using the PyTorch library, which is the most modern and flexible widely-used library available, and we’ll also use the fastai wrapper for PyTorch, which makes it easier to access recommended best practices for training deep learning models (whilst making all the underlying PyTorch functionality directly available too). We think fastai is great, but we’re biased because we made it… but it’s the only general deep learning toolkit featured on pytorch.org, has over 10,000 GitHub stars, and is used in many competition victories, academic papers, and top university courses, so it’s not just us that like it! Note that the concepts you learn will apply equally well to any work you want to do with Tensorflow/keras, CNTK, MXNet, or any other deep learning library; it’s the concepts which matter. Learning a new library just takes a few days if you understand the concepts well. One particularly useful addition this year is that we now have a super-charged video player, thanks to the great work of Zach Caceres. It allows you to search the lesson transcripts, and jump straight to the section of the video that you find. It also shows links to other lessons, and the lesson summary and resources, in collapsible panes (it doesn’t work well on mobile yet however, so if you want to watch on mobile you can use this Youtube playlist). And an extra big thanks to Sylvain Gugger, who has been instrumental in the development of both the course and the fastai library—we’re very grateful to Amazon Web Services for sponsoring Sylvain’s work. If you’re interested in giving it a go, click here to go to the course web site. Now let’s look at each lesson in more detail. Lesson 1: Image classification The most important outcome of lesson 1 is that we’ll have trained an image classifier which can recognize pet breeds at state-of-the-art accuracy. The key to this success is the use of transfer learning, which will be a fundamental platform for much of this course. We’ll also see how to analyze the model to understand its failure modes. In this case, we’ll see that the places where the model is making mistakes are in the same areas that even breeding experts can make mistakes. We’ll discuss the overall approach of the course, which is somewhat unusual in being top-down rather than bottom-up. So rather than starting with theory, and only getting to practical applications later, we start instead with practical applications, and then gradually dig deeper and deeper into them, learning the theory as needed. This approach takes more work for teachers to develop, but it’s been shown to help students a lot, for example in education research at Harvard by David Perkins. We also discuss how to set the most important hyper-parameter when training neural networks: the learning rate, using Leslie Smith’s fantastic learning rate finder method. Finally, we’ll look at the important but rarely discussed topic of labeling, and learn about some of the features that fastai provides for allowing you to easily add labels to your images. Note that to follow along with the lessons, you’ll need to connect to a cloud GPU provider which has the fastai library installed (recommended; it should take only 5 minutes or so, and cost under $0.50/hour), or set up a computer with a suitable GPU yourself (which can take days to get working if you’re not familiar with the process, so we don’t recommend it until later). You’ll also need to be familiar with the basics of the Jupyter Notebook environment we use for running deep learning experiments. Up to date tutorials and recommendations for these are available from the course website. Lesson 2: Data cleaning and production; SGD from scratch We start today’s lesson by learning how to build your own image classification model using your own data, including topics such as: I’ll demonstrate all these steps as I create a model that can take on the vital task of differentiating teddy bears from grizzly bears. Once we’ve got our data set in order, we’ll then learn how to productionize our teddy-finder, and make it available online. We’ve had some great additions since this lesson was recorded, so be sure to check out: In the second half of the lesson we’ll train a simple model from scratch, creating our own gradient descent loop. In the process, we’ll be learning lots of new jargon, so be sure you’ve got a good place to take notes, since we’ll be referring to this new terminology throughout the course (and there will be lots more introduced in every lesson from here on). Lesson 3: Data blocks; Multi-label classification; Segmentation Lots to cover today! We start lesson 3 looking at an interesting dataset: Planet’s Understanding the Amazon from Space. In order to get this data into the shape we need it for modeling, we’ll use one of fastai’s most powerful (and unique!) tools: the data block API. We’ll be coming back to this API many times over the coming lessons, and mastery of it will make you a real fastai superstar! Once you’ve finished this lesson, if you’re ready to learn more about the data block API, have a look at this great article: Finding Data Block Nirvana, by Wayde Gilliam. One important feature of the Planet dataset is that it is a multi-label dataset. That is: each satellite image can contain multiple labels, whereas previous datasets we’ve looked at have had exactly one label per image. We’ll look at what changes we need to make to work with multi-label datasets. Next, we will look at image segmentation, which is the process of labeling every pixel in an image with a category that shows what kind of object is portrayed by that pixel. We will use similar techniques to the earlier image classification models, with a few tweaks. fastai makes image segmentation modeling and interpretation just as easy as image classification, so there won’t be too many tweaks required. We will be using the popular CamVid dataset for this part of the lesson. In future lessons, we will come back to it and show a few extra tricks. Our final CamVid model will have dramatically lower error than any model we’ve been able to find in the academic literature! What if your dependent variable is a continuous value, instead of a category? We answer that question next, looking at a keypoint dataset, and building a model that predicts face keypoints with precision. Lesson 4: NLP; Tabular data; Collaborative filtering; Embeddings In lesson 4 we’ll dive into natural language processing (NLP), using the IMDb movie review dataset. In this task, our goal is to predict whether a movie review is positive or negative; this is called sentiment analysis. We’ll be using the ULMFiT algorithm, which was originally developed during the fast.ai 2018 course, and became part of a revolution in NLP during 2018 which led the New York Times to declare that new systems are starting to crack the code of natural language. ULMFiT is today the most accurate known sentiment analysis algorithm. The basic steps are: After our journey into NLP, we’ll complete our practical applications for Practical Deep Learning for Coders by covering tabular data (such as spreadsheets and database tables), and collaborative filtering (recommendation systems). For tabular data, we’ll see how to use categorical and continuous variables, and how to work with the fastai.tabular module to set up and train a model. Then we’ll see how collaborative filtering models can be built using similar ideas to those for tabular data, but with some special tricks to get both higher accuracy and more informative model interpretation. This brings us to the half-way point of the course, where we have looked at how to build and interpret models in each of these key application areas: For the second half of the course, we’ll learn about how these models really work, and how to create them ourselves from scratch. For this lesson, we’ll put together some of the key pieces we’ve touched on so far: We’ll be coming back to each of these in lots more detail during the remaining lessons. We’ll also learn about a type of layer that is important for NLP, collaborative filtering, and tabular models: the embedding layer. As we’ll discover, an “embedding” is simply a computational shortcut for a particular type of matrix multiplication (a multiplication by a one-hot encoded matrix). Lesson 5: Back propagation; Accelerated SGD; Neural net from scratch In lesson 5 we put all the pieces of training together to understand exactly what is going on when we talk about back propagation. We’ll use this knowledge to create and train a simple neural network from scratch. We’ll also see how we can look inside the weights of an embedding layer, to find out what our model has learned about our categorical variables. This will let us get some insights into which movies we should probably avoid at all costs… Although embeddings are most widely known in the context of word embeddings for NLP, they are at least as important for categorical variables in general, such as for tabular data or collaborative filtering. They can even be used with non-neural models with great success. Lesson 6: Regularization; Convolutions; Data ethics Today we discuss some powerful techniques for improving training and avoiding over-fitting: Next up, we’ll learn all about convolutions, which can be thought of as a variant of matrix multiplication with tied weights, and are the operation at the heart of modern computer vision models (and, increasingly, other types of models too). We’ll use this knowledge to create a class activated map, which is a heat-map that shows which parts of an image were most important in making a prediction. Finally, we’ll cover a topic that many students have told us is the most interesting and surprising part of the course: data ethics. We’ll learn about some of the ways in which models can go wrong, with a particular focus on feedback loops, why they cause problems, and how to avoid them. We’ll also look at ways in which bias in data can lead to biased algorithms, and discuss questions that data scientists can and should be asking to help ensure that their work doesn’t lead to unexpected negative outcomes. Lesson 7: Resnets from scratch; U-net; Generative (adversarial) networks In the final lesson of Practical Deep Learning for Coders we’ll study one of the most important techniques in modern architectures: the skip connection. This is most famously used in the resnet, which is the architecture we’ve used throughout this course for image classification, and appears in many cutting-edge results. We’ll also look at the U-net architecture, which uses a different type of skip connection to greatly improve segmentation results (and also for similar tasks where the output structure is similar to the input). We’ll then use the U-net architecture to train a super-resolution model. This is a model which can increase the resolution of a low-quality image. Our model won’t only increase resolution—it will also remove jpeg artifacts and unwanted text watermarks. In order to make our model produce high quality results, we will need to create a custom loss function which incorporates feature loss (also known as perceptual loss), along with gram loss. These techniques can be used for many other types of image generation task, such as image colorization. We’ll learn about a recent loss function known as generative adversarial loss (used in generative adversarial networks, or GANs), which can improve the quality of generative models in some contexts, at the cost of speed. The techniques we show in this lesson include some unpublished research that: The results are stunning, and train in just a couple of hours (compared to previous approaches that take a couple of days). Finally, we’ll learn how to create a recurrent neural net (RNN) from scratch. This is the foundation of the models we have been using for NLP throughout the course, and it turns out they are a simple refactoring of a regular multi-layer network. Thanks for reading! If you’ve gotten this far, then you should probably head over to course.fast.ai and start watching the first video! |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_visual_art] | [TOKENS: 3972] |
Contents Artificial intelligence visual art Artificial intelligence visual art, or AI art, is visual artwork generated or enhanced through the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) programs, most commonly using text-to-image models. The process of automated art-making has existed since antiquity. The field of artificial intelligence was founded in the 1950s, and artists began to create art with artificial intelligence shortly after the discipline's founding. A select number of these creations have been showcased in museums and have been recognized with awards. Throughout its history, AI has raised many philosophical questions related to the human mind, artificial beings, and the nature of art in human–AI collaboration. During the AI boom of the 2020s, text-to-image models such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion became widely available to the public, allowing users to quickly generate imagery with little effort. Commentary about AI art in the 2020s has often focused on issues related to copyright, deception, defamation, and its impact on more traditional artists, including technological unemployment. History Automated art dates back at least to the automata of ancient Greek civilization, when inventors such as Daedalus and Hero of Alexandria were described as designing machines capable of writing text, generating sounds, and playing music. Creative automatons have flourished throughout history, such as Maillardet's automaton, created around 1800 and capable of creating multiple drawings and poems. Also in the 19th century, Ada Lovelace, wrote that "computing operations" could potentially be used to generate music and poems. In 1950, Alan Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" focused on whether machines can mimic human behavior convincingly. Shortly after, the academic discipline of artificial intelligence was founded at a research workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956. Since its founding, AI researchers have explored philosophical questions about the nature of the human mind and the consequences of creating artificial beings with human-like intelligence; these issues have previously been explored by myth, fiction, and philosophy since antiquity. Since the founding of AI in the 1950s, artists have used artificial intelligence to create artistic works. These works were sometimes referred to as algorithmic art, computer art, digital art, or new media art. One of the first significant AI art systems is AARON, developed by Harold Cohen beginning in the late 1960s at the University of California at San Diego. AARON uses a symbolic rule-based approach to generate technical images in the era of GOFAI programming, and it was developed by Cohen with the goal of being able to code the act of drawing. AARON was exhibited in 1972 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. From 1973 to 1975, Cohen refined AARON during a residency at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. In 2024, the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited AI art from throughout Cohen's career, including re-created versions of his early robotic drawing machines. Karl Sims has exhibited art created with artificial life since the 1980s. He received an M.S. in computer graphics from the MIT Media Lab in 1987 and was artist-in-residence from 1990 to 1996 at the supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence company Thinking Machines. In both 1991 and 1992, Sims won the Golden Nica award at Prix Ars Electronica for his videos using artificial evolution. In 1997, Sims created the interactive artificial evolution installation Galápagos for the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo. Sims received an Emmy Award in 2019 for outstanding achievement in engineering development. In 1999, Scott Draves and a team of several engineers created and released Electric Sheep as a free software screensaver. Electric Sheep is a volunteer computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are distributed to networked computers that display them as a screensaver. The screensaver used AI to create an infinite animation by learning from its audience. In 2001, Draves won the Fundacion Telefónica Life 4.0 prize for Electric Sheep.[unreliable source?] In 2014, Stephanie Dinkins began working on Conversations with Bina48. For the series, Dinkins recorded her conversations with BINA48, a social robot that resembles a middle-aged black woman. In 2019, Dinkins won the Creative Capital award for her creation of an evolving artificial intelligence based on the "interests and culture(s) of people of color." In 2015, Sougwen Chung began Mimicry (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1), an ongoing collaboration between the artist and a robotic arm. In 2019, Chung won the Lumen Prize for her continued performances with a robotic arm that uses AI to attempt to draw in a manner similar to Chung. In 2018, an auction sale of artificial intelligence art was held at Christie's in New York where the AI artwork Edmond de Belamy sold for US$432,500, which was almost 45 times higher than its estimate of US$7,000–10,000. The artwork was created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective. In 2024, Japanese film generAIdoscope was released. The film was co-directed by Hirotaka Adachi, Takeshi Sone, and Hiroki Yamaguchi. All video, audio, and music in the film were created with artificial intelligence. In 2025, the Japanese anime television series Twins Hinahima was released. The anime was produced and animated with AI assistance during the process of cutting and conversion of photographs into anime illustrations and later retouched by art staff. Most of the remaining parts such as characters and logos were hand-drawn with various software. Deep learning, characterized by its multi-layer structure that attempts to mimic the human brain, first came about in the 2010s, causing a significant shift in the world of AI art. During the deep learning era, there are mainly these types of designs for generative art: autoregressive models, diffusion models, GANs, normalizing flows. In 2014, Ian Goodfellow and colleagues at Université de Montréal developed the generative adversarial network (GAN), a type of deep neural network capable of learning to mimic the statistical distribution of input data such as images. The GAN uses a "generator" to create new images and a "discriminator" to decide which created images are considered successful. Unlike previous algorithmic art that followed hand-coded rules, generative adversarial networks could learn a specific aesthetic by analyzing a dataset of example images. In 2015, a team at Google released DeepDream, a program that uses a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia. The process creates deliberately over-processed images with a dream-like appearance reminiscent of a psychedelic experience. Later, in 2017, a conditional GAN learned to generate 1000 image classes of ImageNet, a large visual database designed for use in visual object recognition software research. By conditioning the GAN on both random noise and a specific class label, this approach enhanced the quality of image synthesis for class-conditional models. Autoregressive models were used for image generation, such as PixelRNN (2016), which autoregressively generates one pixel after another with a recurrent neural network. Immediately after the Transformer architecture was proposed in Attention Is All You Need (2018), it was used for autoregressive generation of images, but without text conditioning. The website Artbreeder, launched in 2018, uses the models StyleGAN and BigGAN to allow users to generate and modify images such as faces, landscapes, and paintings. In the 2020s, text-to-image models, which generate images based on prompts, became widely used, marking yet another shift in the creation of AI-generated artworks. In 2021, using the influential large language generative pre-trained transformer models that are used in GPT-2 and GPT-3, OpenAI released a series of images created with the text-to-image AI model DALL-E 1. It is an autoregressive generative model with essentially the same architecture as GPT-3. Along with this, later in 2021, EleutherAI released the open source VQGAN-CLIP based on OpenAI's CLIP model. Diffusion models, generative models used to create synthetic data based on existing data, were first proposed in 2015, but they only became better than GANs in early 2021. Latent diffusion model was published in December 2021 and became the basis for the later Stable Diffusion (August 2022), developed through a collaboration between Stability AI, CompVis Group at LMU Munich, and Runway. In 2022, Midjourney was released, followed by Google Brain's Imagen and Parti, which were announced in May 2022, Microsoft's NUWA-Infinity, and the source-available Stable Diffusion, which was released in August 2022. DALL-E 2, a successor to DALL-E, was beta-tested and released (with the further successor DALL-E 3 being released in 2023). Stability AI has a Stable Diffusion web interface called DreamStudio, plugins for Krita, Photoshop, Blender, and GIMP, and the Automatic1111 web-based open source user interface. Stable Diffusion's main pre-trained model is shared on the Hugging Face Hub. Ideogram was released in August 2023, this model is known for its ability to generate legible text. In 2024, Flux was released. This model can generate realistic images and was integrated into Grok, the chatbot used on X (formerly Twitter), and Le Chat, the chatbot of Mistral AI. Flux was developed by Black Forest Labs, founded by the researchers behind Stable Diffusion. Grok later switched to its own text-to-image model Aurora in December of the same year. Several companies, along with their products, have also developed an AI model integrated with an image editing service. Adobe has released and integrated the AI model Firefly into Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Microsoft has also publicly announced AI image-generator features for Microsoft Paint. Along with this, some examples of text-to-video models of the mid-2020s are Runway's Gen-4, Google's VideoPoet, OpenAI's Sora, which was released in December 2024, and LTX-2 which was released in 2025. In 2025, several models were released. GPT Image 1 from OpenAI, launched in March 2025, introduced new text rendering and multimodal capabilities, enabling image generation from diverse inputs like sketches and text. MidJourney v7 debuted in April 2025, providing improved text prompt processing. In May 2025, Flux.1 Kontext by Black Forest Labs emerged as an efficient model for high-fidelity image generation, while Google's Imagen 4 was released with improved photorealism. Flux.2 debuted in November 2025 with improved image reference, typography, and prompt understanding. Tools and processes There are many approaches used by artists to develop AI visual art. When text-to-image is used, AI generates images based on textual descriptions, using models like diffusion or transformer-based architectures. Users input prompts and the AI produces corresponding visuals. When image-to-image is used, AI transforms an input image into a new style or form based on a prompt or style reference, such as turning a sketch into a photorealistic image or applying an artistic style. When image-to-video is used, AI generates short video clips or animations from a single image or a sequence of images, often adding motion or transitions. This can include animating still portraits or creating dynamic scenes. When text-to-video is used, AI creates videos directly from text prompts, producing animations, realistic scenes, or abstract visuals. This is an extension of text-to-image but focuses on temporal sequences. There are many tools available to the artist when working with diffusion models. They can define both positive and negative prompts, but they are also afforded a choice in using (or omitting the use of) VAEs, LoRAs, hypernetworks, IP-adapter, and embedding/textual inversions. Artists can tweak settings like guidance scale (which balances creativity and accuracy), seed (to control randomness), and upscalers (to enhance image resolution), among others. Additional influence can be exerted during pre-inference by means of noise manipulation, while traditional post-processing techniques are frequently used post-inference. People can also train their own models. In addition, procedural "rule-based" image generation techniques have been developed, utilizing mathematical patterns, algorithms that simulate brush strokes and other painterly effects, as well as deep learning models such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and transformers. Several companies have released applications and websites that allow users to focus exclusively on positive prompts, bypassing the need for manual configuration of other parameters. There are also programs capable of transforming photographs into stylized images that mimic the aesthetics of well-known painting styles. There are many options, ranging from simple consumer-facing mobile apps to Jupyter notebooks and web UIs that require powerful GPUs to run effectively. Additional functionalities include "textual inversion," which refers to enabling the use of user-provided concepts (like an object or a style) learned from a few images. Novel art can then be generated from the associated word(s) (the text that has been assigned to the learned, often abstract, concept) and model extensions or fine-tuning (such as DreamBooth). AI has the potential for a societal transformation, which may include enabling the expansion of non-commercial niche genres (such as cyberpunk derivatives like solarpunk) by amateurs, novel entertainment, fast prototyping, increasing art-making accessibility, and artistic output per effort or expenses or time—e.g., via generating drafts, draft-definitions, and image components (inpainting). Generated images are sometimes used as sketches, low-cost experiments, inspiration, or illustrations of proof-of-concept-stage ideas. Additional functionalities or improvements may also relate to post-generation manual editing (i.e., polishing), such as subsequent tweaking with an image editor. Professional visual artists and designers used generative AI in early-stage conceptualisation (divergent thinking) more than final production (convergent thinking) and practices producing digital or ephemeral outputs (e.g., UI/UX design, concept art) more readily integrate these than those producing physical, permanent artefacts (e.g., sculpture, architecture). In physical domains, concerns regarding structural integrity, material constraints, and cultural "ethno-computation" often limit AI to a "complementary enhancement" role rather than a substitute for production. Furthermore, attitudes toward adoption vary significantly by career stage, with entry-level professionals viewing generative AI as a pragmatic extension of digital tools necessary for market competitiveness, whereas senior practitioners often express critical scepticism regarding the devaluation of embodied expertise and long-term skill development. Prompts for some text-to-image models can also include images and keywords and configurable parameters, such as artistic style, which is often used via keyphrases like "in the style of [name of an artist]" in the prompt /or selection of a broad aesthetic/art style. There are platforms for sharing, trading, searching, forking/refining, or collaborating on prompts for generating specific imagery from image generators. Prompts are often shared along with images on image-sharing websites such as Reddit and AI art-dedicated websites. A prompt is not the complete input needed for the generation of an image; additional inputs that determine the generated image include the output resolution, random seed, and random sampling parameters. Synthetic media, which includes AI art, was described in 2022 as a major technology-driven trend that will affect business in the coming years. Harvard Kennedy School researchers voiced concerns about synthetic media serving as a vector for political misinformation soon after studying the proliferation of AI art on the X platform. Synthography is a proposed term for the practice of generating images that are similar to photographs using AI. Analysis of existing art using AI In addition to the creation of original art, research methods that use AI have been generated to quantitatively analyze digital art collections. This has been made possible due to the large-scale digitization of artwork in the past few decades. According to CETINIC and SHE (2022), using artificial intelligence to analyze already-existing art collections can provide new perspectives on the development of artistic styles and the identification of artistic influences. Two computational methods, close reading and distant viewing, are the typical approaches used to analyze digitized art. Close reading focuses on specific visual aspects of one piece. Some tasks performed by machines in close reading methods include computational artist authentication and analysis of brushstrokes or texture properties. In contrast, through distant viewing methods, the similarity across an entire collection for a specific feature can be statistically visualized. Common tasks relating to this method include automatic classification, object detection, multimodal tasks, knowledge discovery in art history, and computational aesthetics. Synthetic images can also be used to train AI algorithms for art authentication and to detect forgeries. Researchers have also introduced models that predict emotional responses to art. One such model is ArtEmis, a large-scale dataset paired with machine learning models. ArtEmis includes emotional annotations from over 6,500 participants along with textual explanations. By analyzing both visual inputs and the accompanying text descriptions from this dataset, ArtEmis enables the generation of nuanced emotional predictions. Other forms of AI art AI has also been used in arts outside of visual arts. Generative AI has been used to create music, as well as in video game production beyond imagery, especially for level design (e.g., for custom maps) and creating new content (e.g., quests or dialogue) or interactive stories in video games. AI has also been used in the literary arts, such as helping with writer's block, inspiration, or rewriting segments. In the culinary arts, some prototype cooking robots can dynamically taste, which can assist chefs in analyzing the content and flavor of dishes during the cooking process. Use of the term "art" The usage of the label "art" when it applies to works generated by AI software has led to debate among artists, philosophers, scholars, and more. Various observers argue that referring to machine generated images as "art" undermines the traditional characteristics of human artistry, such as creativity, skill, and intentionality. Present-day definitions of true artistic creation often put an emphasis on the requirement of human-level intentions, personal experience and emotion, as well as historical and/or artistic context. According to a research study from the National Library of Medicine, humans inherently show a bias against artwork described as being AI-generated. When participants of the study were shown two comparable images, with only one presented as having been generated by AI, subjects were more likely to rate the one described as being artificially generated lower in artistic value. This suggests that social and cultural attitudes can shape the determination of whether an image is considered art, regardless of the image's other visual features. In a 2023 report submitted to the Annual Convention of Digital Art Observers, Samuel Loomis wrote that the term "AI art" acknowledges its dual nature as a product of human guidance and machine-driven generative systems, when evaluating it by the same critical standards applied to traditional art. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2019-01-13-swift-random.html] | [TOKENS: 2544] |
C++11, random distributions, and Swift Jeremy Howard January 13, 2019 On this page Overview Generating numbers from random distributions is a practically useful tool that any coder is likely to need at some point. C++11 added a rich set of random distribution generation capabilities. This makes it easy and fast to use random distributions, not only if you’re using C++11, but if you’re using any language that lets you interop with C++. In this article, we’ll learn what random distributions are useful for, how they are generated, and how to use them in C++11. I’ll also show how I created new random distribution functionality for Swift by wrapping C++11’s classes as Swift classes. Whilst Swift doesn’t provide direct support for C++, I’ll show how to work around that by creating pure C wrappers for C++ classes. Random distributions, and why they matter If names like negative binomial and poisson are mere shadows of memories of something learned long ago, please give me a moment to try to convince you that the world of random distributions is something that deserves your time and attention. Coders are already aware of the idea of random numbers. But for many, our toolbox is limited to uniform real and integer random numbers, and perhaps some gaussian (normal) random numbers thrown in occassionally as well. There are so many other ways of generating random numbers! In fact, you may even find yourself recreating standard random distributions without being aware of it… For instance, let’s say you’re writing a music player, and your users have rated various songs from one star to five stars. You want to implement a “shuffle play” function, which will select songs at random, but choosing higher rated songs more often. How would you go about implementing that? The answer is: with a random distribution! More specifically, you want random numbers from a discrete distribution; that is, generate a random integer, using a set of weights where the higher weighted numbers are chosen proportionally more often. Or perhaps you are trying to simulate the predicted queue length after adding more resources to a system. You simulate the process, becase you want to know not just the average queue length, but how often it will be bigger than some size, what the 95 percentile size will be, and so forth. You’re not sure what some of the inputs to your system might be, but you know the range of possible values, and you have a guess as to what you think is most likely. In this situation, you want random numbers from a triangular distribution; that is, generate a random float, which is normally close to your guess, and is linearly less likely further away, reducing to a probability of zero outside of the range of possible values. (This kind of simulation forms the backbone of probabilistic programming.) There are dozens of other random distributions, including: How to generate random distributions In general, the steps to generate a number from some random distribution are: What we normally refer as “random number generation” is really step (2): the use of a pseudorandom generator which deterministically generates a series of numbers that are as “random looking” as possible (i.e. not correlated with each other, well spread out, and so forth). The pseudorandom generator is some function with these properties, such as mersenne twister. To start off the series, you need some seed; that is, the first number to pass to the generator. Most operating systems have some way of generating a random seed, such as /dev/random on Linux and Mac, which uses environmental input such as noise from device drivers to get a number that should be truely random. Then in step 3 we transform the random bits created by our pseudorandom generator into something that has the distribution we need. There are universally applicable methods for this, such as inverse transform sampling, which transform a uniform random number into any given distribution. There are also faster methods specific to a distribution, such as the Box-Muller transform which creates gaussian (normal) random numbers from a uniform generator. To create more random numbers, you don’t need to go back to /dev/random, since you already have a pseudorandom generator set up now. Instead, you just grab the next number from your generator (step (2)), and pass that to your distribution generating transform (step (3)). How this works in C++ C++11 includes, in the <random> standard library header, functionality for each of the steps above. Step (1) is achieved by simply creating a random_device (I’m not including the std:: prefix in this article; you would either type std::random_device or add using namespace std to the top of your C++ file). You then pass this to the constructor of one of various pseudorandom generators provided, such as mt19937, which is the mersenne twister generator; that’s step (2). Then you construct a random distribution object using an appropriate class, such as discrete_distribution, passing in whatever arguments are needed by that distribution (e.g. for discrete_distribution you pass in a list of weights for each possible value). Finally, call that object (it supports the () operator, so it’s a functor, known as callable in Python) passing in the pseudorandom generator you created. Here’s a complete example from the excellent cppreference.com. If you thought that C++ code had to be verbose and complicated, this example might just make you rethink your assumptions! As you can see, each step maps nicely to the overview of the random distribution process described in the previous section. (BTW: if you’re interested in learning modern C++, cppreference.com has an extraordinary collection of carefully designed examples for every part of the C++ standard library; it’s perhaps the best place to learn how to use the language effectively in a hands on way. You can even edit the examples and run them online!) The distributions provided by C++11 are: How this works in Swift Although Swift 4 now provides some basic random number support, it still doesn’t provide any non-uniform distributions. Therefore, I’ve made all of the C++11 random distributions available to Swift, as part of my BaseMath library. For more information on why and how I created this library, see High Performance Numeric Programming with Swift. I’ll show how I built this wrapper in a moment, but first let’s see how to use it. Here’s the same function that we saw in C++, converted to Swift+BaseMath: As you see, the generation of the random numbers in Swift can be boiled down using BaseMath to just: Int.discrete_distribution([40, 10, 10, 40]). We can do this more concisely than C++11 because we don’t surface as many options and details. BaseMath simply assumes you want to use the standard seeding method, and use the mt19937 mersenne twister generator. The names of the distributions in BaseMath are exactly the same as in C++11, and you simply prefix each name with the type you wish to generate (either Int or Int32 for integer distributions, or Double or Float for real distributions). Each distribution has an init which matches the same name and types as the C++11 distribution constructor. This returns a Swift object with a number of methods. The C++11 objects, as discussed, provide the () (functor) operator, but unfortunately that operator can not be overloaded in Swift. Therefore instead we borrow Swift’s subscript special method to give us the equivalent behavior. The only difference is we have to use [] instead of (). If you just use the empty subscript [] then BaseMath will return a single random number; if you use an Int, such as then BaseMath will return an array. (There are also methods to generate buffer pointers and aligned storage.) Using subscript instead of a functor may feel a bit odd at first, but it’s a perfectly adequte way to get around Swift’s limitation. I’m going to call this a quasi-functor; that is, something that behaves like a functor, but is called using [...]. Wrapping C++ with Swift In order to make the C++11 random distributions available to Swift, I needed to do two things: We’ll look at each step in turn: The C wrapper code is in CBaseMath.cpp. The mt19937 mersenne twister generator will be wrapped in a Swift class called RandGen, so the C functions wrapping this class all have the RandGen_ prefix. Here’s the code for the C wrappers (note that the wrappers can use C++ features internally, as long as the interface in the header file is plain C): The pattern for each class we wrap will be similar to this. We’ll have at least: In our header, we’ll have each of the functions listed, along with the typedef. Anything importing this C API, including our Swift code, won’t actually know anything about what the struct actually contains, so we won’t be able to use the type directly (since its size and layout isn’t provided in the header). Instead, we’ll simply use opaque pointers in code that uses this. Here’s the code for the wrappers for a distribution; it looks nearly the same: The main difference is the addition of a _call function to allow us to actually call the method. Also, because the type is templated, we have to create a separate set of wrappers for each template type we want to support; the above shows an example for <int>. Note that this type needs to be included in the name of each function, since C doesn’t support overloading. Of course, this all looks rather verbose, and we wouldn’t want to write this all out by hand for every distribution. So we don’t! Instead we use gyb templates to create them for us, and also to auto-generate the header file. Time permitting, we’ll look at that in more detail in the future. But for now, you can check the template’s source code. Now that we’ve got our C API, we can recreate the original C++ class easily in Swift, e.g.: As you see, we simply call our _create function in init, and _destroy in deinit. As discussed in the previous section, our C API users don’t know anything about the internals of our struct, so Swift simply gives us an OpaquePointer. We create similar wrappers for each distribution (which also define subscript, which will call our _call function), plus extending the numeric type with an appropriate static wrapper, e.g.: Having to construct and pass in a RandGen object isn’t convenient, particularly when we have to deal with the complexities of thread safety. C++ libraries are not, in general, thread safe; this includes C++11 random generators. So we have to be careful that we don’t share a RandGen object across threads. As discussed in my previous High Performance Numeric Programming with Swift article, we can easily get thread-safe objects by using Thread Local Storage. I added this property to RandGen: This lets use add versions of the following to each distribution class, which allows users to never have to think about creating or using the RandGen class. The above steps give us the functionality of generating a single random number at a time. In order to generate a collection, we can add a Distribution protocol which each distribution conforms to, and extend it as follows: As you see, we leverage the BaseMath method fill, which calls a function or quasi-functor n times and returns a new BaseVector (in this case, an Array) with the results of each call. You might be wondering about the protocol Nullary that’s mentioned above. Perhaps you’ve already heard of unary (a function or operator with one argument), binary (two arguments), and ternary); less known, but equally useful, is the term nullary, which is simply a function or operator with no arguments. As discussed earlier, Swift doesn’t support overloading the () operator, so we add a Nullary protocol using subscript: Try it out! If you’re a C++ or Swift programmer, try out some of these random distributions—perhaps you could even experiment with creating some simulations and entering the world of probabilistic programming! Or if you’re a Swift programmer that want to use functionaity in a C++ library, try wrapping it with an idiomatic Swift API and make it available as a Swift package for anyone to use. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#cite_ref-rubydung_19-1] | [TOKENS: 3525] |
Contents Markus Persson Markus Alexej Persson (/ˈpɪərsən/ ⓘ PEER-sən, Swedish: [ˈmǎrːkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ⓘ; born 1 June 1979), known by the pseudonym Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is the creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history. He founded the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson began developing video games at an early age. His commercial success began after he published an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over four million copies. After this point Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred his creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014 Persson announced his intention to leave Mojang, and in November of that year the company was sold to Microsoft reportedly for US$2.5 billion, which made him a billionaire. Since 2016 several of Persson's posts on Twitter regarding feminism, race, and transgender rights have caused public controversies. He has been described as "an increasingly polarizing figure, tweeting offensive statements regarding race, the LGBTQ community, gender, and other topics." In an effort to distance itself from Persson, Microsoft removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration. In 2015 he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain, which was relaunched in 2024 as Bitshift Entertainment. Early life Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother, Ritva, and a Swedish father, Birger, on 1 June 1979. He has one sister. He grew up in Edsbyn until he was seven years old, when his family moved back to Stockholm. In Edsbyn, Persson's father worked for the railroad, and his mother was a nurse. He spent much time outdoors in Edsbyn, exploring the woods with his friends. When Persson was about seven years old, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with their mother. His father moved to a cabin in the countryside. Persson said in an interview that they experienced food insecurity around once a month. Persson lost contact with his father for several years after the divorce. According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies. While his father had somewhat recovered during Persson's early life, his father relapsed, contributing to the divorce. His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home. He had gained interest in video games at an early age. His father was "a really big nerd", who built his own modem and taught Persson to use the family's Commodore 128. On it, Persson played bootleg games and loaded in various type-in programs from computer magazines with the help of his sister. The first game he purchased with his own money was The Bard's Tale. He began programming on his father's Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven. He produced his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game. By 1994 Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. Persson, although introverted, was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly had only one friend. He spent most of his spare time with games and programming at home. He managed to reverse-engineer the Doom engine, which he continued to take great pride in as of 2014[update]. He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student. Career Persson started his career working as a web designer. He later found employment at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson. The pair worked in their spare time to build the 2006 video game Wurm Online. The game was released through a new entity, "Mojang Specifications AB". Persson left the project in late 2007. As Persson wanted to reuse the name "Mojang", Jansson agreed to rename the company to Onetoofree AB. Between 2004 and 2009 Persson worked as a game developer for Midasplayer (later known as King). There, he worked as a programmer, mostly building browser games made in Flash. He later worked as a programmer for jAlbum. Prior to creating Minecraft, Persson developed multiple, small games. He also entered a number of game design competitions and participated in discussions on the TIGSource forums, a web forum for independent game developers. One of Persson's more notable personal projects was called RubyDung, an isometric three-dimensional base-building game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress. While working on RubyDung, Persson experimented with a first-person view mode similar to that found in Dungeon Keeper. However, he felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode. In 2009 Persson found inspiration in Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game. Infiniminer heavily influenced his future work on RubyDung, and was behind Persson's reasoning for returning the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals to the game. RubyDung is the earliest known Minecraft prototype created by Persson. On 17 May 2009 Persson released the original edition (later called "Classic version") of Minecraft on the TIGSource forums. He regularly updated the game based on feedback from TIGSource users. Persson released several new versions of Minecraft throughout 2009 and 2010, going through several phases of development including Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev. On 30 June 2010 Persson released the game's Alpha version. While working on the pre-Alpha version of Minecraft, Persson continued working at jAlbum. In 2010, after the release and subsequent success of Minecraft's Alpha version, Persson moved from a full-time role to a part-time role at jAlbum. He left jAlbum later that same year. In September 2010 Persson travelled to Valve Corporation's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, United States, where he took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell. Persson was subsequently offered a job at Valve, which he turned down in order to continue work on Minecraft. On 20 December 2010 Minecraft moved into its beta phase and began expanding to other platforms, including mobile. In January 2011 Minecraft reached one million registered accounts. Six months afterwards, it reached ten million. The game has sold over four million copies by 7 November 2011. Mojang held the first Minecon from 18 to 19 November 2011 to celebrate its full release, and subsequently made it an annual event. Following this, on 11 December 2011, Persson transferred creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and began working on another game title, 0x10c, although he reportedly abandoned the project around 2013. In 2013 Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million and profits of $129 million. Persson has stated that, due to the intense media attention and public pressure, he became exhausted with running Minecraft and Mojang. In a September 2014 blog post he shared his realization that he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. In June 2014 Persson tweeted "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig", reportedly partly as a joke. Persson controlled a 71% stake in Mojang at the time. The offer attracted significant interest from Activision Blizzard, EA, and Microsoft. Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted to purchase the game as a "tax dodge" to turn their taxable excess liquid cash into other assets. In September 2014 Microsoft agreed to purchase Mojang for $2.5 billion, making Persson a billionaire. He then left the company after the deal was finalised in November. Since leaving Mojang, Persson has worked on several small projects. On 23 June 2014 he founded a company with Porsér called Rubberbrain AB; the company had no games by 2021, despite spending SEK 60 million. The company was relaunched as Bitshift Entertainment, LLC on 28 March 2024. Persson expressed interest in creating a new video game studio in 2020, and in developing virtual reality games. He has also since created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party()", which uses extensive visual effects and has been hosted in multiple cities. At the beginning of 2025 Persson decided to create a spiritual successor to Minecraft, referred to as "Minecraft 2", in response to the results of a poll on X. However, after speaking to his team, he shortly went against this in favour of developing the other choice on his Twitter poll, a roguelike titled Levers and Chests. Games Persson's most popular creation is the survival sandbox game Minecraft, which was first publicly available on 17 May 2009 and fully released on 18 November 2011. Persson left his job as a game developer to work on Minecraft full-time until completion. In early 2011, Mojang AB sold the one millionth copy of the game, several months later their second, and several more their third. Mojang hired several new staff members for the Minecraft team, while Persson passed the lead developer role to Jens Bergensten. He stopped working on Minecraft after a deal with Microsoft to sell Mojang for $2.5 billion. This brought his net worth to US$1.5 billion. Persson and Jakob Porsér came up with the idea for Scrolls including elements from board games and collectible card games. Persson noted that he will not be actively involved in development of the game and that Porsér will be developing it. Persson revealed on his Tumblr blog on 5 August 2011 that he was being sued by a Swedish law firm representing Bethesda Softworks over the trademarked name of Scrolls, claiming that it conflicted with their The Elder Scrolls series of games. On 17 August 2011 Persson challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome of the naming dispute. On 27 September 2011 Persson confirmed that the lawsuit was going to court. ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda Softworks, announced the lawsuit's settlement in March 2012. The settlement allowed Mojang to continue using the Scrolls trademark. In 2018, Scrolls was made available free of charge and renamed to Caller's Bane. Cliffhorse is a humorous game programmed in two hours using the Unity game engine and free assets. The game took inspiration from Skyrim's physics engine, "the more embarrassing minimum-effort Greenlight games", Goat Simulator, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The game was released to Microsoft Windows systems as an early access and honourware game on the first day of E3 2014, instructing users to donate Dogecoin to "buy" the game before downloading it. The game accumulated over 280,000 dogecoins. Following the end to his involvement with Minecraft, Persson began pre-production of an alternate reality space game set in the distant future in March 2012. On April Fools' Day Mojang launched a satirical website for Mars Effect (parody of Mass Effect), citing the lawsuit with Bethesda as an inspiration. However, the gameplay elements remained true and on 4 April, Mojang revealed 0x10c (pronounced "Ten to the C") as a space sandbox title. Persson officially halted game production in August 2013. However, C418, the composer of the game's soundtrack (as well as that of Minecraft), released an album of the work he had made for the game. In 2013, Persson made a free game called Shambles in the Unity game engine. Persson has also participated in several Ludum Dare 48-hour game making competitions. Personal life In 2011 Persson married Elin Zetterstrand, whom he had dated for four years before. Zetterstrand was a former moderator on the Minecraft forums. They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her. On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce. The divorce was finalised later that year. On 14 December 2011 Persson's father committed suicide with a handgun after drinking heavily. In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father: When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft, he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him. Persson later admitted that he himself suffered from depression and various highs and lows in his mood. Persson has criticised the stance of large game companies on piracy. He once stated that "piracy is not theft", viewing unauthorised downloads as potential future customers. Persson stated himself to be a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden in 2011. He is also a member of Mensa. He has donated to numerous charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle and raised US$458,248 for charity. He also donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2012. In 2011 he gave $3 million in dividends back to Mojang employees. According to Forbes, his net worth in 2023 was around $1.2 billion. In 2014 Persson was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sweden. Around 2014, he lived in a multi-level penthouse in Östermalm, Stockholm, an area he described as "where the rich people live". In December 2014 Persson purchased a home in Trousdale Estates, a neighbourhood in Beverly Hills, California, in the United States, for $70 million, a record sales price for Beverly Hills at the time. Persson reportedly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the property. Persson began receiving criticism for political and social opinions he expressed on social media as early as 2016. November 30, 2017 In 2017, he proposed a heterosexual pride holiday, and wrote that those who opposed the idea "deserve to be shot." After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing, "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now." Later in the year, he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and called the video game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn a "cunt", although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement. He has described intersectional feminism as a "framework for bigotry" and the use of the word mansplaining as being sexist. Also in 2017, Persson tweeted that "It's okay to be white". Later that year, he stated that he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2019, he tweeted referencing QAnon, saying "Q is legit. Don't trust the media." Later in 2019, he tweeted in response to a pro-transgender internet meme that, "You are absolutely evil if you want to encourage delusion. What happened to not stigmatizing mental illness?" He then also promoted claims that people were fined for "using the wrong pronoun". However, after facing backlash, he tweeted a day afterwards that he had "no idea what [being trans is] like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as. Not because it's a cool choice, because it's a big step. I gues [sic] that's actually cool nvm". Later that year, Microsoft removed two mentions of Persson's name in the "19w13a" snapshot of Minecraft and did not invite him to the 10-year anniversary celebration of the game. A spokesperson for Microsoft stated that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang". He is still mentioned in the End Poem ("a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus").[citation needed] Awards References External links |
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Contents Americas The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America. When viewed as a single continent, the Americas are the second largest continent by area after Asia and the third largest continent by population. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and constitute the New World. Along with their associated islands, the Americas cover 8% of Earth's total surface area and 28.4% of its land area. The topography is dominated by the American Cordillera, a long chain of mountains that runs the length of the west coast. The flatter eastern side of the Americas is dominated by large river basins, such as the Amazon, St. Lawrence River–Great Lakes, Mississippi, and La Plata basins. Since the Americas extend 14,000 km (8,700 mi) from north to south, the climate and ecology vary widely, from the arctic tundra of Northern Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, to the tropical rainforests in Central America and South America. Humans first settled the Americas from Asia between 20,000 and 16,000 years ago. A second migration of Na-Dene speakers followed later from Asia. The subsequent migration of the Inuit into the neoarctic c. 3500 BCE completed what is generally regarded as the settlement by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Norse colonization of North America saw several settlements established in Greenland, and perhaps on the mainland, however, these were later abandoned. The Spanish voyages of Christopher Columbus from 1492 to 1504 resulted in permanent contact with European (and subsequently, other Old World) powers, which eventually led to the Columbian exchange and inaugurated a period of exploration, conquest, and colonization whose effects and consequences persist to the present. The Spanish presence involved the enslavement of large numbers of the indigenous population of the Americas. Diseases introduced from Europe and West Africa devastated the indigenous peoples, and the European powers colonized the Americas. Mass emigration from Europe, including large numbers of indentured servants, and importation of African slaves largely replaced the indigenous peoples in much of the Americas. Decolonization of the Americas began with the American Revolution in the 1770s and largely ended with the Spanish–American War in the late 1890s. Currently, almost all of the population of the Americas resides in independent countries; however, the legacy of the colonization and settlement by Europeans is that the Americas share many common cultural traits, most notably Christianity and the use of West European languages: primarily Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and, to a lesser extent, Dutch. The Americas are home to more than a billion inhabitants, two-thirds of whom reside in the United States, Brazil, and Mexico. It is home to eight megacities (metropolitan areas with 10 million inhabitants or more): Greater Mexico City (21.2 million), São Paulo (21.2 million), New York City (19.7 million), Los Angeles (18.8 million), Buenos Aires (15.6 million), Rio de Janeiro (13.0 million), Bogotá (10.4 million), and Lima (10.1 million). Etymology and naming The name "America" was first recorded in 1507. A world map created by Martin Waldseemüller was the earliest recorded use of the term. The name was also used (together with the related term Amerigen) in the Cosmographiae Introductio, apparently written by Matthias Ringmann, in reference to South America. It was applied to both North and South America by Gerardus Mercator in 1538. "America" derives from Americus, the Latin version of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci's first name. The feminine form America was originally used to refer to the newly discovered continent, which is why it was accorded with the feminine names of the other continents: Asia, Africa, and Europa. Since the 1950s, however, North America and South America have generally been considered by English speakers as separate continents, and taken together are called the Americas, or more rarely America. When conceived as a unitary continent, the form is generally the continent of America in the singular. However, without a clarifying context, singular America in English commonly refers to the United States of America. Terminology Northern America The region was initially termed America or New India on the Mercator maps. Speakers of English generally refer to the landmasses of North America and South America as the Americas, the Western Hemisphere, or the New World. The adjective American may be used to indicate something pertaining to the Americas, but this term is primarily used in English to indicate something pertaining to the United States. Some non-ambiguous alternatives exist, such as the adjective Pan-American, or New Worlder as a demonym for a resident of the closely related New World. Use of America in the hemispherical sense is sometimes retained, or can occur when translated from other languages. For example, the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) in Paris maintains a single continental association for "America", represented by one of the five Olympic rings. American essayist H. L. Mencken said, "The Latin-Americans use Norteamericano in formal writing, but, save in Panama, prefer nicknames in colloquial speech." To avoid "American" one can use constructed terms in their languages derived from "United States" or even "North America". In Canada, its southern neighbor is often referred to as "the United States", "the U.S.A.", or (informally) "the States", while U.S. citizens are generally referred to as "Americans". Most Canadians resent being referred to as "Americans". In Spanish, América is a single continent composed of the subcontinents of América del Sur and América del Norte, the land bridge of América Central, and the islands of the Antillas. Americano or americana in Spanish refers to a person from América in a similar way that in which europeo or europea refers to a person from Europa. The terms sudamericano/a, centroamericano/a, antillano/a and norteamericano/a can be used to more specifically refer to the location where a person may live. Citizens of the United States of America are normally referred to by the terms estadounidense and estadunidense(rough literal translation: "United Statesian") instead of americano or americana which is discouraged, and the country's name itself is officially translated as Estados Unidos de América (United States of America), commonly abbreviated as Estados Unidos (EE. UU.). Also, the term norteamericano (North American) may refer to a citizen of the United States, though in formal writing it is less common since it is used for the inhabitants of North America. In Portuguese, América is a single continent composed of América do Sul (South America), América Central (Central America) and América do Norte (North America). It can be ambiguous, as América can be used to refer to the United States of America, but is avoided in print and formal environments. The demonym 'American' (americano) is commonly used in Portuguese to refer to people from the United States, although the terms 'norte-americano', 'estadounidense' or 'estadunidense' also formally exist and are preferred by those who wish to distinguish it from the continental demonym. In French, the word américain may be used for things relating to the Americas; however, similar to English, it is most often used for things relating to the United States, with the term états-unien sometimes used for clarity. Panaméricain may be used as an adjective to refer to the Americas without ambiguity. French speakers may use the noun Amérique to refer to the whole landmass as one continent, or two continents, Amérique du Nord and Amérique du Sud. In French, Amérique is seldom used to refer to the United States, leading to some ambiguity when it is. Similar to English usage, les Amériques or des Amériques is used to refer unambiguously to the Americas. In Dutch, the word Amerika mostly refers to the United States. Although the United States is equally often referred to as de Verenigde Staten ("the United States") or de VS ("the US"), Amerika relatively rarely refers to the Americas, but it is the only commonly used Dutch word for the Americas. This often leads to ambiguity; and to stress that something concerns the Americas as a whole, Dutch uses a combination, namely Noord- en Zuid-Amerika (North and South America). Latin America and Central America are generally referred to as Latijns Amerika and Midden-Amerika respectively. The adjective Amerikaans is most often used for things or people relating to the United States. There are no alternative words to distinguish between things relating to the United States or to the Americas. Dutch uses the local alternative for things relating to elsewhere in the Americas, such as Argentijns for Argentine, etc. History The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic to European colonization during the Early Modern period. The term Pre-Columbian is used especially often in the context of the great indigenous civilizations of the Americas, such as those of Mesoamerica (Olmec, Toltec, Teotihuacano, Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, Maya) and the Andean civilizations (Inca, Moche, Chavín, Muisca, Cañari). Many pre-Columbian civilizations established characteristics and hallmarks which included permanent or urban settlements, agriculture, civic and monumental architecture, and complex societal hierarchies. Some of these civilizations had long faded by the time of the first permanent European arrivals (c. late 15th–early 16th centuries), and are known only through archeological investigations. Others were contemporary with this period, and are also known from historical accounts of the time. A few, such as the Maya, had their own written records. However, most Europeans of the time viewed such texts as pagan, and much was destroyed in Christian pyres. Only a few hidden documents remain today, leaving modern historians with glimpses of ancient culture and knowledge. The first inhabitants migrated into the Americas from Asia. Habitation sites are known in Alaska and Yukon from at least 20,000 years ago, with suggested ages of up to 40,000 years. Beyond that, the specifics of the Paleo-Indian migration to and throughout the Americas, including the dates and routes traveled, are subject to ongoing research and discussion. Widespread habitation of the Americas occurred after the Late Glacial Maximum, from 16,000 to 13,000 years ago. The traditional theory has been that these early migrants moved into the Beringia land bridge between eastern Siberia and present-day Alaska around 40,000–17,000 years ago, when sea levels were significantly lowered during the Quaternary glaciation. These people are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. Another route proposed is that, either on foot or using primitive boats, they migrated down the Pacific coast to South America. Evidence of the latter would since have been covered by a sea level rise of hundreds of meters following the last ice age. Both routes may have been taken, although the genetic evidences suggests a single founding population. The micro-satellite diversity and distributions specific to South American Indigenous peoples indicates that certain populations have been isolated since the initial colonization of the region. A second migration occurred after the initial peopling of the Americas; Na Dene speakers, found predominantly in North American groups at varying genetic rates, with the highest frequency found among the Athabaskans at 42%, derive from this second wave. Linguists and biologists have reached a similar conclusion based on analysis of Amerindian language groups and ABO blood group system distributions. Then the people of the Arctic small tool tradition, a broad cultural entity that developed along the Alaska Peninsula, around Bristol Bay, and on the eastern shores of the Bering Strait c. 2500 BCE, moved into North America. The Arctic small tool tradition, a Paleo-Eskimo culture, branched off into two cultural variants, including the Pre-Dorset and the Independence traditions of Greenland. The descendants of the Pre-Dorset cultural group, the Dorset culture, were displaced by the final migrants from the Bering sea coast line, the Thule people (the ancestors of modern Inuit), by 1000 CE. Around the same time as the Inuit migrated into Greenland, Viking settlers began arriving in Greenland in 982 and Vinland shortly thereafter, establishing a settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, near the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. Contact between the Norse colonies and Europe was maintained, as James Watson Curran states: From 985 to 1410, Greenland was in touch with the world. Then silence. In 1492 the Vatican noted that no news of that country "at the end of the world" had been received for 80 years, and the bishopric of the colony was offered to a certain ecclesiastic if he would go and "restore Christianity" there. He didn't go. Although there had been previous trans-oceanic contact, large-scale European colonization of the Americas began with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The first Spanish settlement in the Americas was La Isabela in northern Hispaniola. This town was abandoned shortly after in favor of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, founded in 1496, the oldest American city of European foundation. This was the base from which the Spanish monarchy administered its new colonies and their expansion. Santo Domingo was subject to frequent raids by English and French pirates. On the continent, Panama City on the Pacific coast of Central America, founded on August 15, 1519, played an important role, being the base for the Spanish conquest of South America. Conquistador Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón established San Miguel de Guadalupe, the first European settlement in what is now the United States, on the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. During the first half of the 16th century, Spanish colonists conducted raids throughout the Caribbean Basin, bringing captives from Central America, northern South America, and Florida back to Hispaniola and other Spanish settlements. France, led by Jacques Cartier and Giovanni da Verrazzano, focused primarily on North America. English explorations of the Americas were led by Giovanni Caboto and Sir Walter Raleigh. The Dutch in New Netherland confined their operations to Manhattan Island, Long Island, the Hudson River Valley, and what later became New Jersey. The spread of new diseases brought by Europeans and African slaves killed many of the inhabitants of North America and South America, with a general population crash of Native Americans occurring in the mid-16th century, often well ahead of European contact. One of the most devastating diseases was smallpox. European immigrants were often part of state-sponsored attempts to found colonies in the Americas. Migration continued as people moved to the Americas fleeing religious persecution or seeking economic opportunities. Millions of individuals were forcibly transported to the Americas as slaves, prisoners or indentured servants. Decolonization of the Americas began with the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution in the late 1700s. This was followed by numerous Latin American wars of independence in the early 1800s. Between 1811 and 1825, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Gran Colombia, the United Provinces of Central America, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia gained independence from Spain and Portugal in armed revolutions. After the Dominican Republic won independence from Haiti, it was re-annexed by Spain in 1861, but reclaimed its independence in 1865 at the conclusion of the Dominican Restoration War. The last violent episode of decolonization was the Cuban War of Independence which became the Spanish–American War, which resulted in the independence of Cuba in 1898, and the transfer of sovereignty over Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States. Peaceful decolonization began with the United States's purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803, Florida from Spain in 1819, Alaska from Russia in 1867, and the Danish West Indies from Denmark in 1916. Canada became independent of the United Kingdom, starting with the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster 1931 and ending with the patriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982. The Dominion of Newfoundland similarly achieved independence under the Balfour Declaration and Statute of Westminster, but relinquished self-rule in 1934. It was subsequently confederated with Canada in 1949. The remaining European colonies in the Caribbean began to achieve peaceful independence well after World War II. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, and Guyana and Barbados both achieved independence in 1966. In the 1970s, the Bahamas, Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines all became independent of the United Kingdom, and Suriname became independent of the Netherlands. Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis achieved independence from the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Geography The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere. The northernmost point of the Americas is Kaffeklubben Island, which is the most northerly point of land on Earth. The southernmost undisputed point is Águila Islet, although the Antarctic islands of Southern Thule are sometimes taken into account. The mainland of the Americas is the world's longest north-to-south landmass. The distance between its two polar extremities, Murchison Promontory on the Boothia Peninsula in northern Canada and Cape Froward in Chilean Patagonia, is roughly 14,000 km (8,700 mi). The mainland's most westerly point is the end of the Seward Peninsula in Alaska; Attu Island, further off the Alaskan coast to the west, is considered the westernmost point of the Americas. Ponta do Seixas in northeastern Brazil forms the easternmost extremity of the mainland, while Nordostrundingen, in Greenland, is the most easterly point of the continental shelf. South America broke off from the west of the supercontinent Gondwana around 135 million years ago, forming its own continent. Around 15 million years ago, the collision of the Caribbean Plate and the Pacific Plate resulted in the emergence of a series of volcanoes along the border that created a number of islands. The gaps in the archipelago of Central America filled in with material eroded off North America and South America, plus new land created by continued volcanism. By three million years ago, the continents of North America and South America were linked by the Isthmus of Panama, thereby forming the single landmass of the Americas. The Great American Interchange resulted in many species being spread across the Americas, such as the cougar, procyonids, porcupines, opossums, armadillos, and hummingbirds. The geography of the western Americas is dominated by the American Cordillera, with the Andes running along the west coast of South America and the Rocky Mountains and other North American Cordillera ranges running along the western side of North America. The 2,300-kilometer-long (1,400 mi) Appalachian Mountains run along the east coast of North America from Alabama to Newfoundland. North of the Appalachians, the Arctic Cordillera runs along the eastern coast of Canada. The largest mountain ranges are the Andes and Rocky Mountains. The Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range reach similar altitudes as the Rocky Mountains, but are significantly smaller. In North America, the greatest number of fourteeners are in the United States, and more specifically in the US state of Colorado. The highest peaks of the Americas are located in the Andes, with Aconcagua of Argentina being the highest; in North America Denali (Mount McKinley) in the US state of Alaska is the tallest. Between its coastal mountain ranges, North America has vast flat areas. The Interior Plains spread over much of the continent, with low relief. The Canadian Shield covers almost 5 million km2 of North America and is generally quite flat. Similarly, the north-east of South America is covered by the flat Amazon basin. The Brazilian Highlands on the east coast are fairly smooth but show some variations in landform, while farther south the Gran Chaco and Pampas are broad lowlands. The climate of the Americas varies significantly from region to region. Tropical rainforest climate occurs in the latitudes of the Amazon, American cloud forests, southeastern Florida and Darién Gap. In the Rocky Mountains and Andes, dry and continental climates are observed. Often the higher altitudes of these mountains are snow-capped. Southeastern North America is well known for its occurrence of tornadoes and hurricanes, of which the vast majority of tornadoes occur in the United States' Tornado Alley, as well as in the southerly Dixie Alley in the North American late-winter and early spring seasons. Often parts of the Caribbean are exposed to the violent effects of hurricanes. These weather systems are formed by the collision of dry, cool air from Canada and wet, warm air from the Atlantic. With coastal mountains and interior plains, the Americas have several large river basins that drain the continents. The largest river basin in North America is that of the Mississippi, covering the second-largest watershed on the planet. The Mississippi–Missouri river system drains most of 31 states of the United States, most of the Great Plains, and large areas between the Rocky and Appalachian mountains. The Mississippi–Missouri is the fourth-longest river system and has the tenth-greatest discharge in the world. In North America, to the east of the Appalachian Mountains, there are no major rivers but rather a series of rivers and streams that flow east with their terminus in the Atlantic Ocean, such as the Hudson, Saint John, and Savannah rivers. A similar instance arises with central Canadian rivers that drain into Hudson Bay; the largest being the Churchill River. On the west coast of North America, the main rivers are the Colorado, Columbia, Yukon, Fraser, and Sacramento rivers. The Colorado River drains much of the Southern Rockies and parts of the Basin and Range Province. The river flows approximately 1,450 miles (2,330 km) into the Gulf of California, during which over time it has carved out natural phenomena such as the Grand Canyon and created phenomena such as the Salton Sea. The Columbia is a large river, 1,243 miles (2,000 km) long, in central western North America and is the most powerful river on the West Coast of the Americas. In the far northwest of North America, the Yukon drains much of the Alaskan peninsula and flows 1,980 miles (3,190 km) from parts of Yukon and the Northwest Territory to the Pacific. Draining to the Arctic Ocean of Canada, the Mackenzie River drains waters from the Arctic Great Lakes of Arctic Canada, as opposed to the St Lawrence River that drains the Great Lakes of southern Canada into the Atlantic Ocean. The Mackenzie River is the largest in Canada and drains 1,805,200 km2 (697,000 mi2). The largest river basin in South America is that of the Amazon, which has the highest volume flow of any river on Earth. The second largest watershed of South America is that of the Paraná River, which covers about 2,582,074 km2 (996,944 mi2). North America and South America began to develop a shared population of flora and fauna around 2.5 million years ago, when continental drift brought the two continents into contact via the Isthmus of Panama. Initially, the exchange of biota was roughly equal, with North American genera migrating into South America in about the same proportions as South American genera migrated into North America. This exchange is known as the Great American Interchange. The exchange became lopsided after roughly a million years, with the total spread of South American genera into North America far more limited in scope than the spread of North American genera into South America. Countries and territories There are 35 sovereign states in the Americas, as well as an autonomous country of Denmark, three overseas departments of France, three overseas collectivities of France, and one uninhabited territory of France, eight overseas territories of the United Kingdom, three constituent countries of the Netherlands, three public bodies of the Netherlands, two unincorporated territories of the United States, and one uninhabited territory of the United States. Economy In exports and imports, in 2020, the United States was the world's second largest exporter (US$1.64 trillion) and the largest importer (US$2.56 trillion). Mexico was the tenth largest exporter and importer. Canada was the twelfth largest exporter and importer. Brazil was the 24th largest exporter and the 28th largest importer. Chile was the 45th largest exporter and the 47th largest importer. Argentina was the 46th largest exporter and the 52nd largest importer. Colombia was the 54th largest exporter and the 51st largest importer; among others. The agriculture of the continent is very strong and varied. Countries such as United States, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina are among the largest agricultural producers on the planet. In 2019, the continent dominated the world production of soy (almost 90% of the world total, with Brazil, the United States, Argentina, Paraguay, Canada and Bolivia among the 10 largest on the planet), sugarcane (about 55% of the world total, with Brazil, Mexico, the United States, and Guatemala among the 10 largest on the planet), coffee (about 55% of the world total, with Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Peru, and Guatemala among the 10 largest on the planet) and maize (about 48% of the world total, with the United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico among the 10 largest on the planet). The continent also produces almost 40% of world's orange (with Brazil, the United States, and Mexico among the top 10 producers), about 37% of world's pineapple (with Costa Rica, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia among the 10 largest producers), about 35% of world's lemon (with Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States among the 10 largest producers) and about 30% of world's cotton (with the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina among the top 10 producers), among several other products. In livestock, the Americas are major producers. In 2018, the continent produced around 45% of the world's beef (with the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Canada among the world's 10 largest producers); about 36% of the world's chicken meat (with the United States, Brazil, and Mexico among the world's 10 largest producers), and about 28% of the world's cow's milk (with the United States and Brazil among the 10 largest producers in the world), among other products. In industrial terms, the World Bank lists the top producing countries each year, based on the total value of production. According to the 2019 list, the United States has the second most valuable industry in the world (US$2.3 trillion), Mexico has the 12th most valuable industry in the world (US$217.8 billion), Brazil has the 13th most valuable industry in the world (US$173.6 billion), Canada has the 15th most valuable industry in the world (US$151.7 billion), Venezuela the 30th largest (US$58.2 billion, but depends on the oil to obtain this amount), Argentina was the 31st largest (US$57.7 billion), Colombia the 46th largest (US$35.4 billion), Peru the 50th largest ($28.7 billion), and Chile the 51st largest (US$28.3 billion), among others. In the production of oil, the continent had 8 of the 30 largest world producers in 2020: United States (1st), Canada (4th), Brazil (8th), Mexico (14th), Colombia (20th), Venezuela (26th), Ecuador (27th), and Argentina (28th). In the production of natural gas, the continent had 8 of the 32 largest world producers in 2015: United States (1st), Canada (5th), Argentina (18th), Trinidad and Tobago (20th), Mexico (21st), Venezuela (28th), Bolivia (31st), and Brazil (32nd). In the production of coal, the continent had 5 of the 30 largest world producers in 2018: United States (3rd), Colombia (12th), Canada (13th), Mexico (24th), and Brazil (27th). In the production of vehicles, the continent had 5 of the 30 largest world producers in 2019: United States (2nd), Mexico (7th), Brazil (9th), Canada (12th), and Argentina (28th). In the production of steel, the continent had 5 of the 31 largest world producers in 2019: United States (4th), Brazil (9th), Mexico (15th), Canada (18th), and Argentina (31st). In mining, the continent has large productions of gold (mainly in the United States, Canada, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina); silver (mainly in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, and the United States); copper (mainly in Chile, Peru, the United States, Mexico, and Brazil); platinum (Canada and the United States); iron ore (Brazil, Canada, the United States, Peru, and Chile); zinc (Peru, the United States, Mexico, Bolivia, Canada, and Brazil); molybdenum (Chile, Peru, Mexico, Canada, and the United States); lithium (Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Canada); lead (Peru, the United States, Mexico, and Bolivia); bauxite (Brazil, Jamaica, Canada, and the United States); tin (Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil); manganese (Brazil and Mexico); antimony (Bolivia, Mexico, Guatemala, Canada, and Ecuador); nickel (Canada, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the United States); niobium (Brazil and Canada); rhenium (Chile and the United States); and iodine (Chile), among others. Dominica, Panama, and the Dominican Republic have the fastest-growing economy in the Americas according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), 16, five to seven countries in the southern part of the Americas had weakening economies in decline, compared to only three countries in the northern part of the Americas. Haiti has the lowest GDP per capita in the Americas, although its economy was growing slightly as of 2016[update]. Demographics In 2021 the total population of the Americas was about 1.03 billion people, divided as follows: There are three urban centers that each hold titles for being the largest population area based on the three main demographic concepts: In accordance with these definitions, the three largest population centers in the Americas are: Mexico City, anchor to the largest metropolitan area in the Americas; New York City, anchor to the largest urban area in the Americas; and São Paulo, the largest city proper in the Americas. All three cities maintain Alpha classification and large scale influence. The population of the Americas is made up of the descendants of four large ethnic groups and their combinations. The majority of the population lives in Latin America, named for its predominant cultures, rooted in Latin Europe (including the two dominant languages, Spanish and Portuguese, both Romance languages), more specifically in the Iberian nations of Portugal and Spain (hence the use of the term Ibero-America as a synonym). Latin America is typically contrasted with Anglo-America, where English, a Germanic language, is prevalent, and which comprises Canada (with the exception of Francophone Canada rooted in Latin Europe [France]—see Quebec and Acadia) and the United States. Both countries are located in North America, with cultures deriving predominantly from British and other Germanic roots. The transatlantic slave trade brought millions of Africans to the territories of the Americas under the colonial rule of European powers, especially South America. In South America, Portugal played a significant role in the trafficking of enslaved Africans, with estimates suggesting that around 40% of all Africans forcibly brought to the Americas were taken to Brazil alone, to work primarily in sugar cane plantations, mining, and agricultural endeavors. In North America, the British Empire was heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade, with the establishment of colonies such as Virginia, where enslaved Africans were primarily used as labor in tobacco plantations and later in other agricultural and domestic sectors. This system perpetuated for centuries, shaping the socio-economic landscape of all nations of the hemisphere. After the Haitian Revolution led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, which started in 1791 and was the only successful slave revolt in history, the world's first black republic was established. It started with the massacre of the white population, between 3,000 and 5,000 white men and women of all ages were killed. Dessalines declared: — Dessalines, first president of the Republic of Haiti, 1804 The most prevalent faiths in the Americas are as follows: Other faiths include Buddhism; Hinduism; Sikhism; Baháʼí Faith; a wide variety of indigenous religions, many of which can be categorized as animistic; new age religions and many African and African-derived religions. Syncretic faiths can also be found throughout the Americas. Various languages are spoken in the Americas. Some are of European origin, others are spoken by indigenous peoples or are the mixture of various languages like the different creoles. The most widely spoken first language in the Americas is Spanish, followed by English and Portuguese. The dominant language of Latin America is Spanish, though the most populous nation in Latin America, Brazil, speaks Portuguese. Small enclaves of French-, Dutch- and English-speaking regions also exist in Latin America, notably in French Guiana, Suriname, and Belize and Guyana respectively. Haitian Creole is dominant in the nation of Haiti, where French is also spoken. Native languages are more prominent in Latin America than in Anglo-America, with Nahuatl, Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní as the most common. Various other native languages are spoken with less frequency across both Anglo-America and Latin America. Creole languages other than Haitian Creole are also spoken in parts of Latin America. The dominant language of Anglo-America is English. French is also official in Canada, where it is the predominant language in Quebec and an official language in New Brunswick along with English. It is also an important language in Louisiana, and in parts of New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont. Spanish has kept an ongoing presence in the Southwestern United States, which formed part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, especially in California and New Mexico, where a distinct variety of Spanish spoken since the 17th century has survived. It has more recently become widely spoken in other parts of the United States because of heavy immigration from Latin America. High levels of immigration in general have brought great linguistic diversity to Anglo-America, with over 300 languages known to be spoken in the United States alone, but most languages are spoken only in small enclaves and by relatively small immigrant groups. The nations of Guyana, Suriname, and Belize are generally considered[by whom?] not to fall into either Anglo-America or Latin America because of their language differences from Latin America, geographic differences from Anglo-America, and cultural and historical differences from both regions; English is the primary language of Guyana and Belize, and Dutch is the primary language of Suriname. Most of the non-native languages have, to different degrees, evolved differently from the mother country, but are usually still mutually intelligible. Some have combined, however, which has even resulted in completely new languages, such as Papiamento, which is a combination of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch (representing the respective colonizers), native Arawak, various African languages, and, more recently English. The lingua franca Portuñol, a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish, is spoken in the border regions of Brazil and neighboring Spanish-speaking countries. More specifically, Riverense Portuñol is spoken by around 100,000 people in the border regions of Brazil and Uruguay. Because of immigration, there are many communities where other languages are spoken from all parts of the world, especially in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay—very important destinations for immigrants. Culture Baseball is one of the most popular sports in the Americas, having spread through the hemisphere after the growth of US influence in the late 19th century. It overtook cricket, a fellow bat-and-ball sport spread by earlier British influence, in most places outside of the Commonwealth Caribbean. Other American sports, such as basketball, have grown throughout the region over time. Football is perhaps the most popular and followed sport in the Americas. The North American region which also includes the Central and Caribbean national associations is overseen by the CONCACAF, while the South American region and its national teams are represented by the CONMEBOL. Multinational organizations The following is a list of multinational organizations in the Americas. See also Notes References Further reading External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania 19°N 96°W / 19°N 96°W / 19; -96 |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Games_Festival] | [TOKENS: 537] |
Contents Independent Games Festival The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of the independent video game industry. Originally founded in 1998 to promote independent video game developers, and innovation in video game development by CMP Media, later known as UBM Technology Group, IGF is now owned by Informa after UBM's acquisition. The IGF competition awards a total of $50,000 in prizes to independent developers in Main Competition and Student Competition categories and held around the same time as the Game Developers Choice Awards event. From 2007 to 2010, there was a separate event called IGF Mobile for mobile phone games. Competition Structure The festival awards ceremony is split into two broad categories: the main IGF competition and the IGF Student Showcase. The main Independent Games Festival, held in March 2012 at San Francisco's GDC 2012, distributed nine major awards: An additional award, "Excellent in Narrative", was added for the 2013 IGF. In addition, the IGF's Student Showcase competition gives out the following awards each year: Prior to the Festival, developers have the opportunity to submit their game in a playable state to the IGF organization committee for a small fee. These titles are then sent to approximately 300 game industry representatives on the Nominating Committee; these representatives include both indie developers and more mainstream developers and publishers. Each Committee member can nominate any of the provided games to one or more of the categories. Then, for each award category, a pre-selected jury of between seven and fifteen members reviews the nominations and makes a final selection of six finalists (eight for the Nuovo award) and a number of honorable mentions. The selected finalists are expected to present their games at the IGF during the Games Developers Conference; the show provides them a booth space and access to the convention, but finalists either must secure their own travel and lodgings, or name a proxy to demonstrate their games. During the convention, a separate jury selected by the IGF organization committee will review each game, and just prior to the awards, vote for one game in each category. The only exception is the Audience Award, which is voted through online forms by anyone interested. IGF Competition award history Years given below indicate the year when the award was given, with the games or developers being recognized from the previous year. For games that feature unusual controls or user interactions. This award was retired starting from the 2014 competition onward. Ceremonies (Web/Downloadable) Oasis (Web/Downloadable) Wik and the Fable of Souls See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasia] | [TOKENS: 2607] |
Contents Eurasia Eurasia (/jʊəˈreɪʒə/ yoor-AY-zhə, also UK: /-ʃə/ -shə) is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. According to some models of the world, physio-graphically, Eurasia is a single continent. The concept of Europe and Asia as distinct continents dates back to antiquity, and is largely cultural, but their borders have historically been subject to change. For example, the ancient Greeks originally included Africa in Asia but classified Europe as separate land. Eurasia is connected to Africa at the Suez Canal, and the two are sometimes combined to describe the largest contiguous landmass on Earth, Afro-Eurasia. History Eurasia has been the host of many ancient civilizations, including those based in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and China. In the Axial Age (mid-first millennium BCE), a continuous belt of civilizations stretched through the Eurasian subtropical zone from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This belt became the mainstream of world history for two millennia. New connections emerged between the subregions of Eurasia from the Age of Discovery onwards, with the Iberians discovering new maritime routes in the 1490s, and the 1869 completion of the Suez Canal having paved the way for direct passage through the Indo-Mediterranean and the wave of Western European "New Imperialism" that dominated Africa and Asia until the mid-20th century. The communist presence in Eurasia (primarily driven by the Soviet Union) then dominated much of the continent until the end of the Cold War in 1991. Geography Primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, Eurasia spans from Iceland and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Russian Far East, and from the Russian Far North to Maritime Southeast Asia in the south, but other specific geographical limits of Eurasia states that the southern limit is in the Weber's line. Eurasia is bordered by Africa to the southwest, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Pacific Ocean to the east, and the Indo-Mediterranean to the south. The division between Europe and Asia as two continents is a historical social construct, as neither fits the usual definition; thus, in some parts of the world, Eurasia is recognized as the largest of the six, five, or four continents on Earth. Eurasia covers around 55 million square kilometres (21 million square miles), or around 36.2% of the Earth's total land area. The landmass contains well over 5 billion people, equating to approximately 70% of the human population. Humans first settled in Eurasia from Africa 125,000 years ago. The coastline of Eurasia [uk] contains many peninsulas, including the Arabian Peninsula, Korean Peninsula, Indian subcontinent,[a] Anatolia Peninsula, Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Italian Peninsula. Due to its vast size and differences in latitude, Eurasia exhibits all types of climates under the Köppen classification, including the harshest types of hot and cold temperatures, high and low precipitation, and various types of ecosystems. Eurasia is considered a supercontinent, part of the supercontinent of Afro-Eurasia or simply a continent in its own right. In plate tectonics, the Eurasian Plate includes Europe and most of Asia but not the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula or the area of the Russian Far East east of the Chersky Range. From the point of view of history and culture, Eurasia can be loosely subdivided into Western Eurasia and Eastern Eurasia. In geology, Eurasia is often considered as a single rigid mega block, but this is debated. Eurasia formed between 375 and 325 million years ago with the merging of Siberia, Kazakhstania, and Baltica, which was joined to Laurentia (North America), to form Euramerica. This is a list of the longest rivers in Eurasia. Included are all rivers over 3,000 km (1,900 mi). All of the 100 highest mountains on Earth are in Eurasia, in the Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Pamir, Hengduan, and Tian Shan mountain ranges, and all peaks above 7,000 metres are in these ranges and the Transhimalaya. Other high ranges include the Kunlun, Hindu Raj, and Caucasus Mountains. The Alpide belt stretches 15,000 km across southern Eurasia, from Java in Maritime Southeast Asia to the Iberian Peninsula in Western Europe, including the ranges of the Himalayas, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Alborz, Caucasus, and the Alps. Long ranges outside the Alpide Belt include the East Siberian, Altai, Scandinavian, Qinling, Western Ghats, Vindhya, Byrranga, and Annamite Ranges. The largest Eurasian islands by area are Borneo, Sumatra, Honshu, Great Britain, Sulawesi, Java, Luzon, Iceland, Mindanao, Ireland, Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and Sri Lanka. The five most-populated islands in the world are Java, Honshu, Great Britain, Luzon, and Sumatra. Other Eurasian islands with large populations include Mindanao, Taiwan, Salsette, Borneo, Sri Lanka, Sulawesi, Kyushu, and Hainan. The most densely populated islands in Eurasia are Caubian Gamay Island, Ap Lei Chau, and Navotas Island. In the Arctic Ocean, Severny Island, Nordaustlandet, October Revolution Island, and Bolshevik Island are Eurasia's largest uninhabited islands, and Kotelny Island, Alexandra Land, and Spitsbergen are the least-densely populated. Russian geopolitical ideology Originally, "Eurasia" is a geographical notion: in this sense, it is simply the biggest continent; the combined landmass of Europe and Asia. However, geopolitically, the word has several meanings, reflecting specific geopolitical interests. "Eurasia" is one of the most important geopolitical concepts and it figures prominently in the commentaries on the ideas of Halford Mackinder. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observed on Eurasia: "... how America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates 'Eurasia' would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over 'Eurasia' would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in 'Eurasia', and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. 'Eurasia' accounts for about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." — Zbigniew Brzezinski, The grand chessboard : American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives The Russian "Eurasianism" corresponded initially more or less to the land area of Imperial Russia in 1914, including parts of Eastern Europe. One of Russia's main geopolitical interests lies in ever closer integration with those countries that it considers part of "Eurasia." The term Eurasia gained geopolitical reputation as one of the three super-states in 1984, George Orwell's novel where constant surveillance and propaganda are strategic elements (introduced as reflexive antagonists) of the heterogeneous dispositif such metapolitical constructs used to control and exercise power. Regional organizations and alliances Across Eurasia, several single markets have emerged, including the Eurasian Economic Space, European Single Market, ASEAN Economic Community, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. There are also several international organizations and initiatives which seek to promote integration throughout Eurasia, including: The Greater Eurasian Partnership is an initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin, put forward in his address to the Federal Assembly in 2015 with the aim of forming a broad integration framework on the Eurasian continent, as indicated by the Russian Foreign Ministry. In Perm on 29 May 2025, Sergey Lavrov stated at the Eurasian International Socio-Political Hearings on the Formation of an Architecture of an Equal and Indivisible System of Security and Cooperation in the Eurasian Space in 2025 that "the Greater Eurasian Partnership is not limited to economics, trade, transport and logistics alone. It is the material basis for another Russian initiative - the initiative to form a Eurasian security architecture, which Putin put forward in his speech at the Russian Foreign Ministry on 14 June 2024. In Africa, there is a pan-continental organization, the African Union, in Latin America - CELAC, but in Eurasia there is no such pan-continental association yet." Use of term In ancient times, the Greeks classified Europe (derived from the mythological Phoenician princess Europa) and Asia which to the Greeks originally included Africa (derived from Asia, a woman in Greek mythology) as separate "lands". Where to draw the dividing line between the two regions is still a matter of discussion. Especially whether the Kuma-Manych Depression or the Caucasus Mountains form the southeast boundary is disputed, since Mount Elbrus would be part of Europe in the latter case, making it (and not Mont Blanc) Europe's highest mountain. Most accepted is probably the boundary as defined by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg in the 18th century. He defined the dividing line along the Aegean Sea, Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara, Bosporus, Black Sea, Kuma–Manych Depression, Caspian Sea, Ural River, and the Ural Mountains. However, at least part of this definition has been subject to criticism by many modern analytical geographers like Halford Mackinder, who saw little validity in the Ural Mountains as a boundary between continents. Nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Danilevsky defined Eurasia as an entity separate from Europe and Asia, bounded by the Himalayas, the Caucasus, the Alps, the Arctic, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, a definition that has been influential in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Partly inspired by this usage, the term Eurasia is sometimes used to refer to the post-Soviet space – in particular Russia, the Central Asian republics, and the Transcaucasus republics – and sometimes also adjacent regions such as Turkey and Mongolia. The word "Eurasia" is often used in Kazakhstan to describe its location. Numerous Kazakh institutions have the term in their names, like the L. N. Gumilev Eurasian National University (Kazakh: Л. Н. Гумилёв атындағы Еуразия Ұлттық университеті; Евразийский Национальный университет имени Л. Н. Гумилёва) (Lev Gumilev's Eurasianism ideas having been popularized in Kazakhstan by Olzhas Suleimenov), the Eurasian Media Forum, the Eurasian Cultural Foundation (Евразийский фонд культуры), the Eurasian Development Bank (Евразийский банк развития), and the Eurasian Bank. In 2007 Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, proposed building a "Eurasia Canal" to connect the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea via Russia's Kuma-Manych Depression to provide Kazakhstan and other Caspian-basin countries with a more efficient path to the ocean than the existing Volga–Don Canal. This usage can also be seen in the names of Eurasianet, The Journal of Eurasian Studies, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, as well as the titles of numerous academic programs at US universities. This usage is comparable to how Americans use "Western Hemisphere" to describe concepts and organizations dealing with the Americas (e.g., Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). See also Notes References Further reading External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania 50°N 80°E / 50°N 80°E / 50; 80 |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#cite_ref-20] | [TOKENS: 3525] |
Contents Markus Persson Markus Alexej Persson (/ˈpɪərsən/ ⓘ PEER-sən, Swedish: [ˈmǎrːkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ⓘ; born 1 June 1979), known by the pseudonym Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is the creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history. He founded the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson began developing video games at an early age. His commercial success began after he published an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over four million copies. After this point Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred his creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014 Persson announced his intention to leave Mojang, and in November of that year the company was sold to Microsoft reportedly for US$2.5 billion, which made him a billionaire. Since 2016 several of Persson's posts on Twitter regarding feminism, race, and transgender rights have caused public controversies. He has been described as "an increasingly polarizing figure, tweeting offensive statements regarding race, the LGBTQ community, gender, and other topics." In an effort to distance itself from Persson, Microsoft removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration. In 2015 he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain, which was relaunched in 2024 as Bitshift Entertainment. Early life Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother, Ritva, and a Swedish father, Birger, on 1 June 1979. He has one sister. He grew up in Edsbyn until he was seven years old, when his family moved back to Stockholm. In Edsbyn, Persson's father worked for the railroad, and his mother was a nurse. He spent much time outdoors in Edsbyn, exploring the woods with his friends. When Persson was about seven years old, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with their mother. His father moved to a cabin in the countryside. Persson said in an interview that they experienced food insecurity around once a month. Persson lost contact with his father for several years after the divorce. According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies. While his father had somewhat recovered during Persson's early life, his father relapsed, contributing to the divorce. His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home. He had gained interest in video games at an early age. His father was "a really big nerd", who built his own modem and taught Persson to use the family's Commodore 128. On it, Persson played bootleg games and loaded in various type-in programs from computer magazines with the help of his sister. The first game he purchased with his own money was The Bard's Tale. He began programming on his father's Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven. He produced his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game. By 1994 Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. Persson, although introverted, was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly had only one friend. He spent most of his spare time with games and programming at home. He managed to reverse-engineer the Doom engine, which he continued to take great pride in as of 2014[update]. He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student. Career Persson started his career working as a web designer. He later found employment at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson. The pair worked in their spare time to build the 2006 video game Wurm Online. The game was released through a new entity, "Mojang Specifications AB". Persson left the project in late 2007. As Persson wanted to reuse the name "Mojang", Jansson agreed to rename the company to Onetoofree AB. Between 2004 and 2009 Persson worked as a game developer for Midasplayer (later known as King). There, he worked as a programmer, mostly building browser games made in Flash. He later worked as a programmer for jAlbum. Prior to creating Minecraft, Persson developed multiple, small games. He also entered a number of game design competitions and participated in discussions on the TIGSource forums, a web forum for independent game developers. One of Persson's more notable personal projects was called RubyDung, an isometric three-dimensional base-building game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress. While working on RubyDung, Persson experimented with a first-person view mode similar to that found in Dungeon Keeper. However, he felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode. In 2009 Persson found inspiration in Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game. Infiniminer heavily influenced his future work on RubyDung, and was behind Persson's reasoning for returning the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals to the game. RubyDung is the earliest known Minecraft prototype created by Persson. On 17 May 2009 Persson released the original edition (later called "Classic version") of Minecraft on the TIGSource forums. He regularly updated the game based on feedback from TIGSource users. Persson released several new versions of Minecraft throughout 2009 and 2010, going through several phases of development including Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev. On 30 June 2010 Persson released the game's Alpha version. While working on the pre-Alpha version of Minecraft, Persson continued working at jAlbum. In 2010, after the release and subsequent success of Minecraft's Alpha version, Persson moved from a full-time role to a part-time role at jAlbum. He left jAlbum later that same year. In September 2010 Persson travelled to Valve Corporation's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, United States, where he took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell. Persson was subsequently offered a job at Valve, which he turned down in order to continue work on Minecraft. On 20 December 2010 Minecraft moved into its beta phase and began expanding to other platforms, including mobile. In January 2011 Minecraft reached one million registered accounts. Six months afterwards, it reached ten million. The game has sold over four million copies by 7 November 2011. Mojang held the first Minecon from 18 to 19 November 2011 to celebrate its full release, and subsequently made it an annual event. Following this, on 11 December 2011, Persson transferred creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and began working on another game title, 0x10c, although he reportedly abandoned the project around 2013. In 2013 Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million and profits of $129 million. Persson has stated that, due to the intense media attention and public pressure, he became exhausted with running Minecraft and Mojang. In a September 2014 blog post he shared his realization that he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. In June 2014 Persson tweeted "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig", reportedly partly as a joke. Persson controlled a 71% stake in Mojang at the time. The offer attracted significant interest from Activision Blizzard, EA, and Microsoft. Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted to purchase the game as a "tax dodge" to turn their taxable excess liquid cash into other assets. In September 2014 Microsoft agreed to purchase Mojang for $2.5 billion, making Persson a billionaire. He then left the company after the deal was finalised in November. Since leaving Mojang, Persson has worked on several small projects. On 23 June 2014 he founded a company with Porsér called Rubberbrain AB; the company had no games by 2021, despite spending SEK 60 million. The company was relaunched as Bitshift Entertainment, LLC on 28 March 2024. Persson expressed interest in creating a new video game studio in 2020, and in developing virtual reality games. He has also since created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party()", which uses extensive visual effects and has been hosted in multiple cities. At the beginning of 2025 Persson decided to create a spiritual successor to Minecraft, referred to as "Minecraft 2", in response to the results of a poll on X. However, after speaking to his team, he shortly went against this in favour of developing the other choice on his Twitter poll, a roguelike titled Levers and Chests. Games Persson's most popular creation is the survival sandbox game Minecraft, which was first publicly available on 17 May 2009 and fully released on 18 November 2011. Persson left his job as a game developer to work on Minecraft full-time until completion. In early 2011, Mojang AB sold the one millionth copy of the game, several months later their second, and several more their third. Mojang hired several new staff members for the Minecraft team, while Persson passed the lead developer role to Jens Bergensten. He stopped working on Minecraft after a deal with Microsoft to sell Mojang for $2.5 billion. This brought his net worth to US$1.5 billion. Persson and Jakob Porsér came up with the idea for Scrolls including elements from board games and collectible card games. Persson noted that he will not be actively involved in development of the game and that Porsér will be developing it. Persson revealed on his Tumblr blog on 5 August 2011 that he was being sued by a Swedish law firm representing Bethesda Softworks over the trademarked name of Scrolls, claiming that it conflicted with their The Elder Scrolls series of games. On 17 August 2011 Persson challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome of the naming dispute. On 27 September 2011 Persson confirmed that the lawsuit was going to court. ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda Softworks, announced the lawsuit's settlement in March 2012. The settlement allowed Mojang to continue using the Scrolls trademark. In 2018, Scrolls was made available free of charge and renamed to Caller's Bane. Cliffhorse is a humorous game programmed in two hours using the Unity game engine and free assets. The game took inspiration from Skyrim's physics engine, "the more embarrassing minimum-effort Greenlight games", Goat Simulator, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The game was released to Microsoft Windows systems as an early access and honourware game on the first day of E3 2014, instructing users to donate Dogecoin to "buy" the game before downloading it. The game accumulated over 280,000 dogecoins. Following the end to his involvement with Minecraft, Persson began pre-production of an alternate reality space game set in the distant future in March 2012. On April Fools' Day Mojang launched a satirical website for Mars Effect (parody of Mass Effect), citing the lawsuit with Bethesda as an inspiration. However, the gameplay elements remained true and on 4 April, Mojang revealed 0x10c (pronounced "Ten to the C") as a space sandbox title. Persson officially halted game production in August 2013. However, C418, the composer of the game's soundtrack (as well as that of Minecraft), released an album of the work he had made for the game. In 2013, Persson made a free game called Shambles in the Unity game engine. Persson has also participated in several Ludum Dare 48-hour game making competitions. Personal life In 2011 Persson married Elin Zetterstrand, whom he had dated for four years before. Zetterstrand was a former moderator on the Minecraft forums. They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her. On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce. The divorce was finalised later that year. On 14 December 2011 Persson's father committed suicide with a handgun after drinking heavily. In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father: When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft, he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him. Persson later admitted that he himself suffered from depression and various highs and lows in his mood. Persson has criticised the stance of large game companies on piracy. He once stated that "piracy is not theft", viewing unauthorised downloads as potential future customers. Persson stated himself to be a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden in 2011. He is also a member of Mensa. He has donated to numerous charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle and raised US$458,248 for charity. He also donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2012. In 2011 he gave $3 million in dividends back to Mojang employees. According to Forbes, his net worth in 2023 was around $1.2 billion. In 2014 Persson was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sweden. Around 2014, he lived in a multi-level penthouse in Östermalm, Stockholm, an area he described as "where the rich people live". In December 2014 Persson purchased a home in Trousdale Estates, a neighbourhood in Beverly Hills, California, in the United States, for $70 million, a record sales price for Beverly Hills at the time. Persson reportedly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the property. Persson began receiving criticism for political and social opinions he expressed on social media as early as 2016. November 30, 2017 In 2017, he proposed a heterosexual pride holiday, and wrote that those who opposed the idea "deserve to be shot." After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing, "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now." Later in the year, he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and called the video game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn a "cunt", although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement. He has described intersectional feminism as a "framework for bigotry" and the use of the word mansplaining as being sexist. Also in 2017, Persson tweeted that "It's okay to be white". Later that year, he stated that he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2019, he tweeted referencing QAnon, saying "Q is legit. Don't trust the media." Later in 2019, he tweeted in response to a pro-transgender internet meme that, "You are absolutely evil if you want to encourage delusion. What happened to not stigmatizing mental illness?" He then also promoted claims that people were fined for "using the wrong pronoun". However, after facing backlash, he tweeted a day afterwards that he had "no idea what [being trans is] like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as. Not because it's a cool choice, because it's a big step. I gues [sic] that's actually cool nvm". Later that year, Microsoft removed two mentions of Persson's name in the "19w13a" snapshot of Minecraft and did not invite him to the 10-year anniversary celebration of the game. A spokesperson for Microsoft stated that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang". He is still mentioned in the End Poem ("a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus").[citation needed] Awards References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft#cite_note-IGFnoms-322] | [TOKENS: 12858] |
Contents Minecraft Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Following its initial public alpha release in 2009, it was formally released in 2011 for personal computers. The game has since been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles. In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated world with virtually infinite terrain made up of voxels (cubes). They can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, build structures, fight hostile mobs, and cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game's large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. Originally created by Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java programming language, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten was handed control over the game's development following its full release. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the unified cross-platform version which evolved from the Pocket Edition codebase[i] and replaced the legacy console versions. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang's original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history with over 350 million copies sold. It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing it. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025 and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time. Gameplay Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, giving players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a voxel grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. Very few blocks are affected by gravity, instead maintaining their voxel position in the air. Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or bows and arrows), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with villagers (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes. The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks). There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively. The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is randomly chosen at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures, worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not. Implementation of horizontally infinite generation initially resulted in a glitch termed the "Far Lands" at over 12 million blocks away from the world center, where terrain generated as wall-like, fissured patterns. The Far Lands and associated glitches were considered the effective edge of the world until they were resolved, with the current horizontal limit instead being a special impassable barrier called the world border, located 30 million blocks away. Vertical space is comparatively limited, with an unbreakable bedrock layer at the bottom and a building limit several hundred blocks into the sky. Minecraft features three independent dimensions accessible through portals and providing alternate game environments. The Overworld is the starting dimension and represents the real world, with a terrestrial surface setting including plains, mountains, forests, oceans, caves, and small sources of lava. The Nether is a hell-like underworld dimension accessed via an obsidian portal and composed mainly of lava. Mobs that populate the Nether include shrieking, fireball-shooting ghasts, alongside anthropomorphic pigs called piglins and their zombified counterparts. Piglins in particular have a bartering system, where players can give them gold ingots and receive items in return. Structures known as Nether Fortresses generate in the Nether, containing mobs such as wither skeletons and blazes, which can drop blaze rods needed to access the End dimension. The player can also choose to build an optional boss mob known as the Wither, using skulls obtained from wither skeletons and soul sand. The End can be reached through an end portal, consisting of twelve end portal frames. End portals are found in underground structures in the Overworld known as strongholds. To find strongholds, players must craft eyes of ender using an ender pearl and blaze powder. Eyes of ender can then be thrown, traveling in the direction of the stronghold. Once the player reaches the stronghold, they can place eyes of ender into each portal frame to activate the end portal. The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island. Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which, when entered, cues the game's ending credits and the End Poem, a roughly 1,500-word work written by Irish novelist Julian Gough, which takes about nine minutes to scroll past, is the game's only narrative text, and the only text of significant length directed at the player.: 10–12 At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely. In Survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night. The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from mobs, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game unless the player is playing on peaceful difficulty. If the hunger bar is empty, the player starves. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful. Upon losing all health, players die. The items in the players' inventories are dropped unless the game is reconfigured not to do so. Players then re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game and can be changed by sleeping in a bed or using a respawn anchor. Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points (commonly referred to as "xp" or "exp") by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, animal breeding, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects. The game features two more game modes based on Survival, known as Hardcore mode and Adventure mode. Hardcore mode plays identically to Survival mode, but with the game's difficulty setting locked to "Hard" and with permadeath, forcing them to delete the world or explore it as a spectator after dying. Adventure mode was added to the game in a post-launch update, and prevents the player from directly modifying the game's world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended. In Creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly. Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their characters usually do not take any damage nor are affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance. Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. It is available through direct game-to-game multiplayer, local area network (LAN) play, local split screen (console-only), and servers (player-hosted and business-hosted). Players can run their own server by making a realm, using a host provider, hosting one themselves or connect directly to another player's game via Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or Nintendo Switch Online. Single-player worlds have LAN support, allowing players to join a world on locally interconnected computers without a server setup. Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed or disallowed to enter the server. Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. The largest and most popular server is Hypixel, which has been visited by over 14 million unique players. Player versus player combat (PvP) can be enabled to allow fighting between players. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without having to set up their own. Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use server addresses. Minecraft: Java Edition Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at a time. Minecraft Realms server owners can invite up to 3,000 people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at one time. The Minecraft: Java Edition Realms servers do not support user-made plugins, but players can play custom Minecraft maps. Minecraft Bedrock Realms servers support user-made add-ons, resource packs, behavior packs, and custom Minecraft maps. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, support for cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android platforms was added through Realms starting in June 2016, with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017, and support for virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play. Nintendo Switch support for Realms was released in July 2018. The modding community consists of fans, users and third-party programmers. Using a variety of application program interfaces that have arisen over time, they have produced a wide variety of downloadable content for Minecraft, such as modifications, texture packs and custom maps. Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms. The modding community is responsible for a substantial supply of mods from ones that enhance gameplay, such as mini-maps, waypoints, and durability counters, to ones that add to the game elements from other video games and media. While a variety of mod frameworks were independently developed by reverse engineering the code, Mojang has also enhanced vanilla Minecraft with official frameworks for modification, allowing the production of community-created resource packs, which alter certain game elements including textures and sounds. Players can also create their own "maps" (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. Mojang added an adventure mode in August 2012 and "command blocks" in October 2012, which were created specially for custom maps in Java Edition. Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation. The Xbox 360 Edition supported downloadable content, which was available to purchase via the Xbox Games Store; these content packs usually contained additional character skins. It later received support for texture packs in its twelfth title update while introducing "mash-up packs", which combined texture packs with skin packs and changes to the game's sounds, music and user interface. The first mash-up pack (and by extension, the first texture pack) for the Xbox 360 Edition was released on 4 September 2013, and was themed after the Mass Effect franchise. Unlike Java Edition, however, the Xbox 360 Edition did not support player-made mods or custom maps. A cross-promotional resource pack based on the Super Mario franchise by Nintendo was released exclusively for the Wii U Edition worldwide on 17 May 2016, and later bundled free with the Nintendo Switch Edition at launch. Another based on Fallout was released on consoles that December, and for Windows and Mobile in April 2017. In April 2018, malware was discovered in several downloadable user-made Minecraft skins for use with the Java Edition of the game. Avast stated that nearly 50,000 accounts were infected, and when activated, the malware would attempt to reformat the user's hard drive. Mojang promptly patched the issue, and released a statement stating that "the code would not be run or read by the game itself", and would run only when the image containing the skin itself was opened. In June 2017, Mojang released the "1.1 Discovery Update" to the Pocket Edition of the game, which later became the Bedrock Edition. The update introduced the "Marketplace", a catalogue of purchasable user-generated content intended to give Minecraft creators "another way to make a living from the game". Various skins, maps, texture packs and add-ons from different creators can be bought with "Minecoins", a digital currency that is purchased with real money. Additionally, users can access specific content with a subscription service titled "Marketplace Pass". Alongside content from independent creators, the Marketplace also houses items published by Mojang and Microsoft themselves, as well as official collaborations between Minecraft and other intellectual properties. By 2022, the Marketplace had over 1.7 billion content downloads, generating over $500 million in revenue. Development Before creating Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was a game developer at King, where he worked until March 2009. At King, he primarily developed browser games and learned several programming languages. During his free time, he prototyped his own games, often drawing inspiration from other titles, and was an active participant on the TIGSource forums for independent developers. One such project was "RubyDung", a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with an isometric, three-dimensional perspective similar to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Among the features in RubyDung that he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper, though he ultimately discarded this idea, feeling the graphics were too pixelated at the time. Around March 2009, Persson left King and joined jAlbum, while continuing to work on his prototypes. Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game first released in April 2009, inspired Persson's vision for RubyDung's future direction. Infiniminer heavily influenced the visual style of gameplay, including bringing back the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements. The first public alpha build of Minecraft was released on 17 May 2009 on TIGSource. Over the years, Persson regularly released test builds that added new features, including tools, mobs, and entire new dimensions. In 2011, partly due to the game's rising popularity, Persson decided to release a full 1.0 version—a second part of the "Adventure Update"—on 18 November 2011. Shortly after, Persson stepped down from development, handing the project's lead to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten. On 15 September 2014, Microsoft, the developer behind the Microsoft Windows operating system and Xbox video game console, announced a $2.5 billion acquisition of Mojang, which included the Minecraft intellectual property. Persson had suggested the deal on Twitter, asking a corporation to buy his stake in the game after receiving criticism for enforcing terms in the game's end-user license agreement (EULA), which had been in place for the past three years. According to Persson, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh received a call from a Microsoft executive shortly after the tweet, asking if Persson was serious about a deal. Mojang was also approached by other companies including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The deal with Microsoft was arbitrated on 6 November 2014 and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires". After 2014, Minecraft's primary versions received usually annual major updates—free to players who have purchased the game— each primarily centered around a specific theme. For instance, version 1.13, the Update Aquatic, focused on ocean-related features, while version 1.16, the Nether Update, introduced significant changes to the Nether dimension. However, in late 2024, Mojang announced a shift in their update strategy; rather than releasing large updates annually, they opted for a more frequent release schedule with smaller, incremental updates, stating, "We know that you want new Minecraft content more often." The Bedrock Edition has also received regular updates, now matching the themes of the Java Edition updates. Other versions of the game, such as various console editions and the Pocket Edition, were either merged into Bedrock or discontinued and have not received further updates. On 7 May 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free. On 16 April 2020, a Bedrock Edition-exclusive beta version of Minecraft, called Minecraft RTX, was released by Nvidia. It introduced physically-based rendering, real-time path tracing, and DLSS for RTX-enabled GPUs. The public release was made available on 8 December 2020. Path tracing can only be enabled in supported worlds, which can be downloaded for free via the in-game Minecraft Marketplace, with a texture pack from Nvidia's website, or with compatible third-party texture packs. It cannot be enabled by default with any texture pack on any world. Initially, Minecraft RTX was affected by many bugs, display errors, and instability issues. On 22 March 2025, a new visual mode called Vibrant Visuals, an optional graphical overhaul similar to Minecraft RTX, was announced. It promises modern rendering features—such as dynamic shadows, screen space reflections, volumetric fog, and bloom—without the need of RTX-capable hardware. Vibrant Visuals was released as a part of the Chase the Skies update on 17 June 2025 for Bedrock Edition and is planned to release on Java Edition at a later date. Development began for the original edition of Minecraft—then known as Cave Game, and now known as the Java Edition—in May 2009,[k] and ended on 13 May, when Persson released a test video on YouTube of an early version of the game, dubbed the "Cave game tech test" or the "Cave game tech demo". The game was named Minecraft: Order of the Stone the next day, after a suggestion made by a player. "Order of the Stone" came from the webcomic The Order of the Stick, and "Minecraft" was chosen "because it's a good name". The title was later shortened to just Minecraft, omitting the subtitle. Persson completed the game's base programming over a weekend in May 2009, and private testing began on TigIRC on 16 May. The first public release followed on 17 May 2009 as a developmental version shared on the TIGSource forums. Based on feedback from forum users, Persson continued updating the game. This initial public build later became known as Classic. Further developmental phases—dubbed Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev—were released throughout 2009 and 2010. The first major update, known as Alpha, was released on 30 June 2010. At the time, Persson was still working a day job at jAlbum but later resigned to focus on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version surged. Updates were distributed automatically, introducing new blocks, items, mobs, and changes to game mechanics such as water flow. With revenue generated from the game, Persson founded Mojang, a video game studio, alongside former colleagues Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh. On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft would enter its beta phase on 20 December. He assured players that bug fixes and all pre-release updates would remain free. As development progressed, Mojang expanded, hiring additional employees to work on the project. The game officially exited beta and launched in full on 18 November 2011. On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead designer. On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced the hiring of the developers behind Bukkit, a popular developer API for Minecraft servers, to improve Minecraft's support of server modifications. This move included Mojang taking apparent ownership of the CraftBukkit server mod, though this apparent acquisition later became controversial, and its legitimacy was questioned due to CraftBukkit's open-source nature and licensing under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License. In August 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released as an early alpha for the Xperia Play via the Android Market, later expanding to other Android devices on 8 October 2011. The iOS version followed on 17 November 2011. A port was made available for Windows Phones shortly after Microsoft acquired Mojang. Unlike Java Edition, Pocket Edition initially focused on Minecraft's creative building and basic survival elements but lacked many features of the PC version. Bergensten confirmed on Twitter that the Pocket Edition was written in C++ rather than Java, as iOS does not support Java. On 10 December 2014, a port of Pocket Edition was released for Windows Phone 8.1. In July 2015, a port of the Pocket Edition to Windows 10 was released as the Windows 10 Edition, with full crossplay to other Pocket versions. In January 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer maintain the Windows Phone versions of Pocket Edition. On 20 September 2017, with the "Better Together Update", the Pocket Edition was ported to the Xbox One, and was renamed to the Bedrock Edition. The console versions of Minecraft debuted with the Xbox 360 edition, developed by 4J Studios and released on 9 May 2012. Announced as part of the Xbox Live Arcade NEXT promotion, this version introduced a redesigned crafting system, a new control interface, in-game tutorials, split-screen multiplayer, and online play via Xbox Live. Unlike the PC version, its worlds were finite, bordered by invisible walls. Initially, the Xbox 360 version resembled outdated PC versions but received updates to bring it closer to Java Edition before eventually being discontinued. The Xbox One version launched on 5 September 2014, featuring larger worlds and support for more players. Minecraft expanded to PlayStation platforms with PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 editions released on 17 December 2013 and 4 September 2014, respectively. Originally planned as a PS4 launch title, it was delayed before its eventual release. A PlayStation Vita version followed in October 2014. Like the Xbox versions, the PlayStation editions were developed by 4J Studios. Nintendo platforms received Minecraft: Wii U Edition on 17 December 2015, with a physical release in North America on 17 June 2016 and in Europe on 30 June. The Nintendo Switch version launched via the eShop on 11 May 2017. During a Nintendo Direct presentation on 13 September 2017, Nintendo announced that Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition, based on the Pocket Edition, would be available for download immediately after the livestream, and a physical copy available on a later date. The game is compatible only with the New Nintendo 3DS or New Nintendo 2DS XL systems and does not work with the original 3DS or 2DS systems. On 20 September 2017, the Better Together Update introduced Bedrock Edition across Xbox One, Windows 10, VR, and mobile platforms, enabling cross-play between these versions. Bedrock Edition later expanded to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, with the latter receiving the update in December 2019, allowing cross-platform play for users with a free Xbox Live account. The Bedrock Edition released a native version for PlayStation 5 on 22 October 2024, while the Xbox Series X/S version launched on 17 June 2025. On 18 December 2018, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, and Wii U versions of Minecraft received their final update and would later become known as "Legacy Console Editions". On 15 January 2019, the New Nintendo 3DS version of Minecraft received its final update, effectively becoming discontinued as well. An educational version of Minecraft, designed for use in schools, launched on 1 November 2016. It is available on Android, ChromeOS, iPadOS, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. On 20 August 2018, Mojang announced that it would bring Education Edition to iPadOS in Autumn 2018. It was released to the App Store on 6 September 2018. On 27 March 2019, it was announced that it would be operated by JD.com in China. On 26 June 2020, a public beta for the Education Edition was made available to Google Play Store compatible Chromebooks. The full game was released to the Google Play Store for Chromebooks on 7 August 2020. On 20 May 2016, China Edition (also known as My World) was announced as a localized edition for China, where it was released under a licensing agreement between NetEase and Mojang. The PC edition was released for public testing on 8 August 2017. The iOS version was released on 15 September 2017, and the Android version was released on 12 October 2017. The PC edition is based on the original Java Edition, while the iOS and Android mobile versions are based on the Bedrock Edition. The edition is free-to-play and had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. This version of Bedrock Edition is exclusive to Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The beta release for Windows 10 launched on the Windows Store on 29 July 2015. After nearly a year and a half in beta, Microsoft fully released the version on 19 December 2016. Called the "Ender Update", this release implemented new features to this version of Minecraft like world templates and add-on packs. On 7 June 2022, the Java and Bedrock Editions of Minecraft were merged into a single bundle for purchase on Windows; those who owned one version would automatically gain access to the other version. Both game versions would otherwise remain separate. Around 2011, prior to Minecraft's full release, Mojang collaborated with The Lego Group to create a Lego brick-based Minecraft game called Brickcraft. This would have modified the base Minecraft game to use Lego bricks, which meant adapting the basic 1×1 block to account for larger pieces typically used in Lego sets. Persson worked on an early version called "Project Rex Kwon Do", named after the character of the same name from the film Napoleon Dynamite. Although Lego approved the project and Mojang assigned two developers for six months, it was canceled due to the Lego Group's demands, according to Mojang's Daniel Kaplan. Lego considered buying Mojang to complete the game, but when Microsoft offered over $2 billion for the company, Lego stepped back, unsure of Minecraft's potential. On 26 June 2025, a build of Brickcraft dated 28 June 2012 was published on a community archive website Omniarchive. Initially, Markus Persson planned to support the Oculus Rift with a Minecraft port. However, after Facebook acquired Oculus in 2013, he abruptly canceled the plans, stating, "Facebook creeps me out." In 2016, a community-made mod, Minecraft VR, added VR support for Java Edition, followed by Vivecraft for HTC Vive. Later that year, Microsoft introduced official Oculus Rift support for Windows 10 Edition, leading to the discontinuation of the Minecraft VR mod due to trademark complaints. Vivecraft was endorsed by Minecraft VR contributors for its Rift support. Also available is a Gear VR version, titled Minecraft: Gear VR Edition. Windows Mixed Reality support was added in 2017. On 7 September 2020, Mojang Studios announced that the PlayStation 4 Bedrock version would receive PlayStation VR support later that month. In September 2024, the Minecraft team announced they would no longer support PlayStation VR, which received its final update in March 2025. Music and sound design Minecraft's music and sound effects were produced by German musician Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. To create the sound effects for the game, Rosenfeld made extensive use of Foley techniques. On learning the processes for the game, he remarked, "Foley's an interesting thing, and I had to learn its subtleties. Early on, I wasn't that knowledgeable about it. It's a whole trial-and-error process. You just make a sound and eventually you go, 'Oh my God, that's it! Get the microphone!' There's no set way of doing anything at all." He reminisced on creating the in-game sound for grass blocks, stating "It turns out that to make grass sounds you don't actually walk on grass and record it, because grass sounds like nothing. What you want to do is get a VHS, break it apart, and just lightly touch the tape." According to Rosenfeld, his favorite sound to design for the game was the hisses of spiders. He elaborates, "I like the spiders. Recording that was a whole day of me researching what a spider sounds like. Turns out, there are spiders that make little screeching sounds, so I think I got this recording of a fire hose, put it in a sampler, and just pitched it around until it sounded like a weird spider was talking to you." Many of the sound design decisions by Rosenfeld were done accidentally or spontaneously. The creeper notably lacks any specific noises apart from a loud fuse-like sound when about to explode; Rosenfeld later recalled "That was just a complete accident by Markus and me [sic]. We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work hilariously well, so we kept it." On other sounds, such as those of the zombie, Rosenfeld remarked, "I actually never wanted the zombies so scary. I intentionally made them sound comical. It's nice to hear that they work so well [...]." Rosenfeld remarked that the sound engine was "terrible" to work with, remembering "If you had two song files at once, it [the game engine] would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine." The background music in Minecraft consists of instrumental ambient music. To compose the music of Minecraft, Rosenfeld used the package from Ableton Live, along with several additional plug-ins. Speaking on them, Rosenfeld said "They can be pretty much everything from an effect to an entire orchestra. Additionally, I've got some synthesizers that are attached to the computer. Like a Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet 08 and a Virus TI." On 4 March 2011, Rosenfeld released a soundtrack titled Minecraft – Volume Alpha; it includes most of the tracks featured in Minecraft, as well as other music not featured in the game. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku chose the music in Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011. On 9 November 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Beta, which included the music that was added in a 2013 "Music Update" for the game. A physical release of Volume Alpha, consisting of CDs, black vinyl, and limited-edition transparent green vinyl LPs, was issued by indie electronic label Ghostly International on 21 August 2015. On 14 August 2020, Ghostly released Volume Beta on CD and vinyl, with alternate color LPs and lenticular cover pressings released in limited quantities. The final update Rosenfeld worked on was 2018's 1.13 Update Aquatic. His music remained the only music in the game until 2020's "Nether Update", introducing pieces from Lena Raine. Since then, other composers have made contributions, including Kumi Tanioka, Samuel Åberg, Aaron Cherof, and Amos Roddy, with Raine remaining as the new primary composer. Ownership of all music besides Rosenfeld's independently released albums has been retained by Microsoft, with their label publishing all of the other artists' releases. Gareth Coker also composed some of the music for the game's mini games from the Legacy Console editions. Rosenfeld had stated his intent to create a third album of music for the game in a 2015 interview with Fact, and confirmed its existence in a 2017 tweet, stating that his work on the record as of then had tallied up to be longer than the previous two albums combined, which in total clocks in at over 3 hours and 18 minutes. However, due to licensing issues with Microsoft, the third volume has since not seen release. On 8 January 2021, Rosenfeld was asked in an interview with Anthony Fantano whether or not there was still a third volume of his music intended for release. Rosenfeld responded, saying, "I have something—I consider it finished—but things have become complicated, especially as Minecraft is now a big property, so I don't know." Reception Minecraft has received critical acclaim, with praise for the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay. Critics have expressed enjoyment in Minecraft's complex crafting system, commenting that it is an important aspect of the game's open-ended gameplay. Most publications were impressed by the game's "blocky" graphics, with IGN describing them as "instantly memorable". Reviewers also liked the game's adventure elements, noting that the game creates a good balance between exploring and building. The game's multiplayer feature has been generally received favorably, with IGN commenting that "adventuring is always better with friends". Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer said Minecraft is "intuitively interesting and contagiously fun, with an unparalleled scope for creativity and memorable experiences". It has been regarded as having introduced millions of children to the digital world, insofar as its basic game mechanics are logically analogous to computer commands. IGN was disappointed about the troublesome steps needed to set up multiplayer servers, calling it a "hassle". Critics also said that visual glitches occur periodically. Despite its release out of beta in 2011, GameSpot said the game had an "unfinished feel", adding that some game elements seem "incomplete or thrown together in haste". A review of the alpha version, by Scott Munro of the Daily Record, called it "already something special" and urged readers to buy it. Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun also recommended the alpha of the game, calling it "a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker". On 17 September 2010, gaming webcomic Penny Arcade began a series of comics and news posts about the addictiveness of the game. The Xbox 360 version was generally received positively by critics, but did not receive as much praise as the PC version. Although reviewers were disappointed by the lack of features such as mod support and content from the PC version, they acclaimed the port's addition of a tutorial and in-game tips and crafting recipes, saying that they make the game more user-friendly. The Xbox One Edition was one of the best received ports, being praised for its relatively large worlds. The PlayStation 3 Edition also received generally favorable reviews, being compared to the Xbox 360 Edition and praised for its well-adapted controls. The PlayStation 4 edition was the best received port to date, being praised for having 36 times larger worlds than the PlayStation 3 edition and described as nearly identical to the Xbox One edition. The PlayStation Vita Edition received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for its technical limitations. The Wii U version received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for a lack of GamePad integration. The 3DS version received mixed reviews, being criticized for its high price, technical issues, and lack of cross-platform play. The Nintendo Switch Edition received fairly positive reviews from critics, being praised, like other modern ports, for its relatively larger worlds. Minecraft: Pocket Edition initially received mixed reviews from critics. Although reviewers appreciated the game's intuitive controls, they were disappointed by the lack of content. The inability to collect resources and craft items, as well as the limited types of blocks and lack of hostile mobs, were especially criticized. After updates added more content, Pocket Edition started receiving more positive reviews. Reviewers complimented the controls and the graphics, but still noted a lack of content. Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made €23 million (US$33 million) in revenue, with 800,000 sales of the alpha version of the game, and over 1 million sales of the beta version. In November 2011, prior to the game's full release, Minecraft beta surpassed 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases. By March 2012, Minecraft had become the 6th best-selling PC game of all time. As of 10 October 2014[update], the game had sold 17 million copies on PC, becoming the best-selling PC game of all time. On 25 February 2014, the game reached 100 million registered users. By May 2019, 180 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the single best-selling video game of all time. The free-to-play Minecraft China version had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. By 2023, the game had sold over 300 million copies. As of April 2025, Minecraft has sold over 350 million copies. The Xbox 360 version of Minecraft became profitable within the first day of the game's release in 2012, when the game broke the Xbox Live sales records with 400,000 players online. Within a week of being on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Minecraft sold a million copies. GameSpot announced in December 2012 that Minecraft sold over 4.48 million copies since the game debuted on Xbox Live Arcade in May 2012. In 2012, Minecraft was the most purchased title on Xbox Live Arcade; it was also the fourth most played title on Xbox Live based on average unique users per day. As of 4 April 2014[update], the Xbox 360 version has sold 12 million copies. In addition, Minecraft: Pocket Edition has reached a figure of 21 million in sales. The PlayStation 3 Edition sold one million copies in five weeks. The release of the game's PlayStation Vita version boosted Minecraft sales by 79%, outselling both PS3 and PS4 debut releases and becoming the largest Minecraft launch on a PlayStation console. The PS Vita version sold 100,000 digital copies in Japan within the first two months of release, according to an announcement by SCE Japan Asia. By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of Minecraft were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version. As of 2022, the Vita version has sold over 1.65 million physical copies in Japan, making it the best-selling Vita game in the country. Minecraft helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second quarter. The game, including all of its versions, had over 112 million monthly active players by September 2019. On its 11th anniversary in May 2020, the company announced that Minecraft had reached over 200 million copies sold across platforms with over 126 million monthly active players. By April 2021, the number of active monthly users had climbed to 140 million. In July 2010, PC Gamer listed Minecraft as the fourth-best game to play at work. In December of that year, Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for Best Downloadable Game of 2010, Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun named it the "game of the year". Indie DB awarded the game the 2010 Indie of the Year award as chosen by voters, in addition to two out of five Editor's Choice awards for Most Innovative and Best Singleplayer Indie. It was also awarded Game of the Year by PC Gamer UK. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards at the March 2011 Independent Games Festival and won the Grand Prize and the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011, Minecraft won awards in the categories for Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game and Innovation Award, winning every award for which it was nominated. It also won GameCity's video game arts award. On 5 May 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on 16 March 2012. At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and was nominated in the Best PC Game category. In 2012, at the British Academy Video Games Awards, Minecraft was nominated in the GAME Award of 2011 category and Persson received The Special Award. In 2012, Minecraft XBLA was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the Best Downloadable Game category, and a TIGA Games Industry Award in the Best Arcade Game category. In 2013, it was nominated as the family game of the year at the British Academy Video Games Awards. During the 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft for "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year". Minecraft Console Edition won the award for TIGA Game Of The Year in 2014. In 2015, the game placed 6th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. In 2016, Minecraft placed 6th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Minecraft was nominated for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite App, but lost to Temple Run. It was nominated for the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite Video Game, but lost to Just Dance 2014. The game later won the award for the Most Addicting Game at the 2015 Kids' Choice Awards. In addition, the Java Edition was nominated for "Favorite Video Game" at the 2018 Kids' Choice Awards, while the game itself won the "Still Playing" award at the 2019 Golden Joystick Awards, as well as the "Favorite Video Game" award at the 2020 Kids' Choice Awards. Minecraft also won "Stream Game of the Year" at inaugural Streamer Awards in 2021. The game later garnered a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award nomination for Favorite Video Game in 2021, and won the same category in 2022 and 2023. At the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, it won the Still Playing Award - PC and Console. Minecraft has been subject to several notable controversies. In June 2014, Mojang announced that it would begin enforcing the portion of Minecraft's end-user license agreement (EULA) which prohibits servers from giving in-game advantages to players in exchange for donations or payments. Spokesperson Owen Hill stated that servers could still require players to pay a fee to access the server and could sell in-game cosmetic items. The change was supported by Persson, citing emails he received from parents of children who had spent hundreds of dollars on servers. The Minecraft community and server owners protested, arguing that the EULA's terms were more broad than Mojang was claiming, that the crackdown would force smaller servers to shut down for financial reasons, and that Mojang was suppressing competition for its own Minecraft Realms subscription service. The controversy contributed to Notch's decision to sell Mojang. In 2020, Mojang announced an eventual change to the Java Edition to require a login from a Microsoft account rather than a Mojang account, the latter of which would be sunsetted. This also required Java Edition players to create Xbox network Gamertags. Mojang defended the move to Microsoft accounts by saying that improved security could be offered, including two-factor authentication, blocking cyberbullies in chat, and improved parental controls. The community responded with intense backlash, citing various technical difficulties encountered in the process and how account migration would be mandatory, even for those who do not play on servers. As of 10 March 2022, Microsoft required that all players migrate in order to maintain access the Java Edition of Minecraft. Mojang announced a deadline of 19 September 2023 for account migration, after which all legacy Mojang accounts became inaccessible and unable to be migrated. In June 2022, Mojang added a player-reporting feature in Java Edition. Players could report other players on multiplayer servers for sending messages prohibited by the Xbox Live Code of Conduct; report categories included profane language,[l] substance abuse, hate speech, threats of violence, and nudity. If a player was found to be in violation of Xbox Community Standards, they would be banned from all servers for a specific period of time or permanently. The update containing the report feature (1.19.1) was released on 27 July 2022. Mojang received substantial backlash and protest from community members, one of the most common complaints being that banned players would be forbidden from joining any server, even private ones. Others took issue to what they saw as Microsoft increasing control over its player base and exercising censorship, leading some to start a hashtag #saveminecraft and dub the version "1.19.84", a reference to the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The "Mob Vote" was an online event organized by Mojang in which the Minecraft community voted between three original mob concepts; initially, the winning mob was to be implemented in a future update, while the losing mobs were scrapped, though after the first mob vote this was changed, and losing mobs would now have a chance to come to the game in the future. The first Mob Vote was held during Minecon Earth 2017 and became an annual event starting with Minecraft Live 2020. The Mob Vote was often criticized for forcing players to choose one mob instead of implementing all three, causing divisions and flaming within the community, and potentially allowing internet bots and Minecraft content creators with large fanbases to conduct vote brigading. The Mob Vote was also blamed for a perceived lack of new content added to Minecraft since Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang in 2014. The 2023 Mob Vote featured three passive mobs—the crab, the penguin, and the armadillo—with voting scheduled to start on 13 October. In response, a Change.org petition was created on 6 October, demanding that Mojang eliminate the Mob Vote and instead implement all three mobs going forward. The petition received approximately 445,000 signatures by 13 October and was joined by calls to boycott the Mob Vote, as well as a partially tongue-in-cheek "revolutionary" propaganda campaign in which sympathizers created anti-Mojang and pro-boycott posters in the vein of real 20th century propaganda posters. Mojang did not release an official response to the boycott, and the Mob Vote otherwise proceeded normally, with the armadillo winning the vote. In September 2024, as part of a blog post detailing their future plans for Minecraft's development, Mojang announced the Mob Vote would be retired. Cultural impact In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of the 21st century to date, and in November 2019, Polygon called it the "most important game of the decade" in its 2010s "decade in review". In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft. Research conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs. Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded. The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube's gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform. By 2018, it was still YouTube's biggest game globally. Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a now-defunct gaming video company that owned a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube. The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance. Another well-known YouTube personality is Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, who has also created many Minecraft music parodies, including "Revenge", a parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love". Minecraft's popularity on YouTube was described by Polygon as quietly dominant, although in 2019, thanks in part to PewDiePie's playthroughs of the game, Minecraft experienced a visible uptick in popularity on the platform. Longer-running series include Far Lands or Bust, dedicated to reaching the obsolete "Far Lands" glitch by foot on an older version of the game. YouTube announced that on 14 December 2021 that the total amount of Minecraft-related views on the website had exceeded one trillion. Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, and FTL: Faster Than Light. Minecraft is officially represented in downloadable content for the crossover fighter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Steve as a playable character with a moveset including references to building, crafting, and redstone, alongside an Overworld-themed stage. It was also referenced by electronic music artist Deadmau5 in his performances. The game is also referenced heavily in "Informative Murder Porn", the second episode of the seventeenth season of the animated television series South Park. In 2025, A Minecraft Movie was released. It made $313 million in the box office in the first week, a record-breaking opening for a video game adaptation. Minecraft has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as many of the generation's members played the game at a young age. The possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design (CAD) and education. In a panel at Minecon 2011, a Swedish developer discussed the possibility of using the game to redesign public buildings and parks, stating that rendering using Minecraft was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of new buildings and parks. In 2012, a member of the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab, Cody Sumter, said: "Notch hasn't just built a game. He's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program." Various software has been developed to allow virtual designs to be printed using professional 3D printers or personal printers such as MakerBot and RepRap. In September 2012, Mojang began the Block by Block project in cooperation with UN Habitat to create real-world environments in Minecraft. The project allows young people who live in those environments to participate in designing the changes they would like to see. Using Minecraft, the community has helped reconstruct the areas of concern, and citizens are invited to enter the Minecraft servers and modify their own neighborhood. Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016." Mojang signed Minecraft building community, FyreUK, to help render the environments into Minecraft. The first pilot project began in Kibera, one of Nairobi's informal settlements and is in the planning phase. The Block by Block project is based on an earlier initiative started in October 2011, Mina Kvarter (My Block), which gave young people in Swedish communities a tool to visualize how they wanted to change their part of town. According to Manneh, the project was a helpful way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having a training in architecture. The ideas presented by the citizens were a template for political decisions. In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency generated all of Denmark in fullscale in Minecraft based on their own geodata. This is possible because Denmark is one of the flattest countries with the highest point at 171 meters (ranking as the country with the 30th smallest elevation span), where the limit in default Minecraft was around 192 meters above in-game sea level when the project was completed. Taking advantage of the game's accessibility where other websites are censored, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders has used an open Minecraft server to create the Uncensored Library, a repository within the game of journalism by authors from countries (including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam) who have been censored and arrested, such as Jamal Khashoggi. The neoclassical virtual building was created over about 250 hours by an international team of 24 people. Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft speedrunning, where players time themselves from spawning into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss, is popular. Some speedrunners use a combination of mods, external programs, and debug menus, while other runners play the game in a more vanilla or more consistency-oriented way. Minecraft has been used in educational settings through initiatives such as MinecraftEdu, founded in 2011 to make the game affordable and accessible for schools in collaboration with Mojang. MinecraftEdu provided features allowing teachers to monitor student progress, including screenshot submissions as evidence of lesson completion, and by 2012 reported that approximately 250,000 students worldwide had access to the platform. Mojang also developed Minecraft: Education Edition with pre-built lesson plans for up to 30 students in a closed environment. Educators have used Minecraft to teach subjects such as history, language arts, and science through custom-built environments, including reconstructions of historical landmarks and large-scale models of biological structures such as animal cells. The introduction of redstone blocks enabled the construction of functional virtual machines such as a hard drive and an 8-bit computer. Mods have been created to use these mechanics for teaching programming. In 2014, the British Museum announced a project to reproduce its building and exhibits in Minecraft in collaboration with the public. Microsoft and Code.org have offered Minecraft-based tutorials and activities designed to teach programming, reporting by 2018 that more than 85 million children had used their resources. In 2025, the Musée de Minéralogie in Paris held a temporary exhibition titled "Minerals in Minecraft." Following the initial surge in popularity of Minecraft in 2010, other video games were criticised for having various similarities to Minecraft, and some were described as being "clones", often due to a direct inspiration from Minecraft, or a superficial similarity. Examples include Ace of Spades, CastleMiner, CraftWorld, FortressCraft, Terraria, BlockWorld 3D, Total Miner, and Luanti (formerly Minetest). David Frampton, designer of The Blockheads, reported that one failure of his 2D game was the "low resolution pixel art" that too closely resembled the art in Minecraft, which resulted in "some resistance" from fans. A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system. In response to Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and their Minecraft IP, various developers announced further clone titles developed specifically for Nintendo's consoles, as they were the only major platforms not to officially receive Minecraft at the time. These clone titles include UCraft (Nexis Games), Cube Life: Island Survival (Cypronia), Discovery (Noowanda), Battleminer (Wobbly Tooth Games), Cube Creator 3D (Big John Games), and Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games). Despite this, the fears of fans were unfounded, with official Minecraft releases on Nintendo consoles eventually resuming. Markus Persson made another similar game, Minicraft, for a Ludum Dare competition in 2011. In 2025, Persson announced through a poll on his X account that he was considering developing a spiritual successor to Minecraft. He later clarified that he was "100% serious", and that he had "basically announced Minecraft 2". Within days, however, Persson cancelled the plans after speaking to his team. In November 2024, artificial intelligence companies Decart and Etched released Oasis, an artificially generated version of Minecraft, as a proof of concept. Every in-game element is completely AI-generated in real time and the model does not store world data, leading to "hallucinations" such as items and blocks appearing that were not there before. In January 2026, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest that year. On 10 February, Mojang issued a DMCA takedown of Allumeria on Steam through Valve, alleging the game was infringing on Minecraft's copyright. Some reports suggested that the takedown may have used an automatic AI copyright claiming service. The DMCA was later withdrawn. Minecon was an annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first full Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes; exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community. In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual "Minecon Earth" livestreams on minecraft.net and YouTube instead. These livestreams, later rebranded to "Minecraft Live", included the mob/biome votes, and announcements of new game updates. In 2025, "Minecraft Live" became a biannual event as part of Minecraft's changing update schedule.[citation needed] Notes References External links |
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High Performance Numeric Programming with Swift: Explorations and Reflections Jeremy Howard January 10, 2019 On this page Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on building some numeric programming libraries for Swift. But wait, isn’t Swift just what iOS programmers use for building apps? Not any more! Nowadays Swift runs on Linux and Mac, and can be used for web applications, command line tools, and nearly anything else you can think of. Using Swift for numeric programming, such as training machine learning models, is not an area that many people are working on. There’s very little information around on the topic. But after a few weeks of research and experimentation I’ve managed to create a couple of libraries that can achieve the same speed as carefully optimized vectorized C code, whilst being concise and easy to use. In this article, I’ll take you through this journey and show you what I’ve learned about how to use Swift effectively for numeric programming. I will include examples mainly from my BaseMath library, which provides generic math functions for Float and Double, and optimized versions for various collections of them. (Along the way, I’ll have plenty to say, both positive and negative, about both Swift and other languages; if you’re someone who has a deep emotional connection to your favorite programming language and doesn’t like to see any criticism of it, you might want to skip this post!) In a future post I’ll also show how to get additional speed and functionality by interfacing with Intel’s Performance Libraries for C. Background Generally around the new year I try to experiment with a new language or framework. One approach that’s worked particularly well for me is to look at what the people that built some of my favorite languages, books, and libraries are doing now. This approach led me to being a very early user of Delphi, Typescript, and C# (Anders Hejlsberg, after I used his Turbo Pascal), Perl (Larry Wall, after I used rn), JQuery (John Resig, after I read Modern Javascript), and more. So when I learnt that Chris Lattner (who wrote the wonderful LLVM) is creating a new deep learning framework called Swift for Tensorflow (which I’ll shorten to S4TF from here), I decided that I should take a look. Note that S4TF is not just a boring Swift wrapper for Tensorflow! It’s the first serious effort I’ve seen to incorporate differentiable programming deep in to the heart of a widely used language. I’m hoping that S4TF will give us a language and framework that, for the first time, treats differentiable-programming as a first-class citizen of the programming world, and will allow us to do things like: These things are not available in S4TF, at least as yet (in fact, it’s such early days for the project that nearly none of the deep learning functionality works yet). But I fully expect them to happen eventually, and when that happens, I’m confident that using differentiable programming in Swift will be a far better experience in Swift than in any other language. I was lucky enough to bump in to Chris at a recent conference, and when I told him about my interest in S4TF, he was kind enough to offer to help me get started with Swift. I’ve always found that who I work with matters much more to my productivity and happiness than what I work on, so that was another excellent reason to spend time on this project. Chris has been terrifically helpful, and he’s super-nice as well—so thanks, Chris! About Swift Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language. It was started by Chris Lattner while he was at Apple, and supported many concepts from Objective-C (the main language used for programming for Apple devices). Chris described the language to me as “syntax sugar for LLVM”, since it maps so closely to many of the ideas in that compiler framework. I’ve been coding for around 30 years, and in that time have used dozens of languages (and have even contributed to some. I always hope that when I start looking at a new language that there will be some mind-opening new ideas to find, and Swift definitely doesn’t disappoint. Swift tries to be expressive, flexible, concise, safe, easy to use, and fast. Most languages compromise significantly in at least one of these areas. Here’s my personal view of some languages that I’ve used and enjoyed, but all of which have limitations I’ve found frustrating at times: I’d say that Swift actually does a pretty good job of avoiding any major compromises (possibly Rust does too; I haven’t used it seriously so can’t make an informed comment). It’s not the best at any of the areas I’ve mentioned, but it’s not too far off either. I don’t know of another single language that can make that claim (but note that it also has its downsides, which I’ll address in the last section of this article). I’ll look briefly at each in turn: Protocol-oriented programming The main trick that lets Swift avoid compromises is its use of Protocol-oriented programming. The basic idea is that we try to use value types as much as possible. In most languages where ease-of-use is important, reference types are widely used since they allow the use of garbage collection, virtual functions, overriding super-class behavior, and so forth. Protocol-oriented programming is Swift’s way of getting many of these benefits, whilst avoiding the overhead of reference types. In addition, by avoiding reference types, we avoid all the complex bugs introduced when we have two variables pointing at the same thing. Value types are also a great match for functional styles of programming, since they allow for better support of immutability and related functional concerns. Many programmers, particularly in the Javascript world, have recently developed an understanding of how code can be more concise, understandable, and correct, by leveraging a functional style. If you’ve used a language like C#, you’ll already be familiar with the idea that defining something with struct gives you a value type, and using class gives you a reference type. This is exactly how Swift handles things too. Before we get to protocols, let’s mention a couple of other fundamentals: Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), and copy-on-write. From the docs: “Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to track and manage your app’s memory usage. In most cases, this means that memory management “just works” in Swift, and you do not need to think about memory management yourself. ARC automatically frees up the memory used by class instances when those instances are no longer needed.” Reference counting has traditionally been used by dynamic languages like Perl and Python. Seeing it in a modern compiled language is quite unusual. However, Swift’s compiler works hard to track references carefully, without introducing overhead. ARC is important both for handling Swift’s reference types (which we still need to use sometimes), and also to handle memory use in value type objects sharing memory with copy-on-write semantics, or which are embedded in a reference type. Chris also mentioned to me a number of other benefits: it provides deterministic destruction, eliminates the common problems with GC finalizers, allows scaling down to systems that don’t/can’t want a GC, and eliminates unpredictable/unreproducible pauses. One major problem with value types in most languages is that if you have something like a big array, you wouldn’t want to pass the whole thing to a function, since that would require a lot of slow memory allocation and copying. So most languages use a pointer or reference in this situation. Swift, however, passes a reference to the original memory, but if the reference mutates the object, only then does it get copied (this is done behind the scenes automatically). So we get the best performance characteristics of value and reference types combined! This is refered to as “copy-on-wrote”, which is rather delightfully refered to in some S4TF docs as “COW 🐮” (yes, with the cow face emoji too!) COW also helps with programming in a functional style, yet still allowing for mutation when needed—but without the overhead of unnecessary copying or verbosity of manual references. With value types, we can’t use inheritance hierarchies to get the benefits of object-oriented programming (although you can still use these if you use reference types, which are also supported by Swift). So instead, Swift gives us protocols. Many languages, such as Typescript, C#, and Java, have the idea of interfaces—metadata which describes what properties and methods an object can contain. At first glance, protocols look a lot like interfaces. For instance, here’s the definition from my BaseMath library of ComposedStorage, which is a protocol describing a collection that wraps some other collection. It defines two properties, data and endIndex, and one method, subscript (which is a special method in Swift, and provides indexing functionality, like an array). This protocol definition simply says that anything that conforms to this protocol must provide implementations of these three things. This is a generic protocol. Generic protocols don’t use <Type> markers like generic classes, but instead use the associatedtype keyword. So in this case, ComposedStorage is saying that the data attribute contains something of a generic type called Storage which conforms to the MutableCollection protocol, and that type in turn has an associatedtype called Index which must be of type Int in order to conform to ComposedStorage. It also says that the subscript method returns whatever type the Storage’s Element associatedtype contains. As you can see, protocols provide quite an expressive type system. Now look further, and you’ll see something else… there are also implementations provided for this protocol! This is where things get really interesting. By providing implementations, we’re automatically adding functionality to any object that conforms to this protocol. For instance, here is the entire definition from BaseMath of AlignedStorage, a class provides array-like functionality but internally uses aligned-memory, which is often required for fast vectorized code: As you can see, there’s not much code at all. And yet this class provides all of the functionality of the protocols RandomAccessCollection, MutableCollection, ExpressibleByArrayLiteral, Equatable, and BaseVector (which together include hundreds of methods such as map, find, dropLast, and distance). This is possible because the protocols that this class conforms to, BaseVector and ComposedStorage, provide this functionality through protocol extensions (either directly, or by other protocols that they in turn conform to). Incidentally, you may have noticed that I defined AlignedStorage as class, not struct, despite all my earlier hype about value types! It’s important to realize that there are still some situations where classes are required. Apple’s documentation provides some helpful guidance on this topic. One thing that structs don’t (yet) support is deinit; that is, the ability to run some code when an object is destroyed. In this case, we need to deallocate our memory when we’re all done with our object, so we need deinit, which means we need a class. One common situation where you’ll find you really need to use protocols is where you want the behavior of abstract classes. Swift doesn’t support abstract classes at all, but you can get the same effect by using protocols (e.g. in the above code ComposedStorage defines data but doesn’t implement it in the protocol extension, therefore it acts like an abstract property). The same is true of multiple inheritance: it’s not supported by Swift classes, but you can conform to multiple protocols, each of which can have extensions (this is sometimes refered to as mixins in Swift). Protocol extensions share a lot of ideas with traits in Rust and typeclasses in Haskell. Generics over Float and Double For numeric programming, if you’re creating a library then you probably want it to transparently support at least Float and Double. However, Swift doesn’t make this easy. There is a protocol called BinaryFloatingPoint which in theory supports these types, but unfortunately only three math functions in Swift are defined for this protocol (abs, max, and min - and the standard math operators +-*/). You could, of course, simply provide separate functionality for each type, but then you’ve got to deal with creating two versions of everything, and your users have to deal with the same problem too. Interestingly enough, I’ve found no discussions of this issue online, and Swift’s own libraries suffer from this issue in multiple places. As discussed below, Swift hasn’t been used much at all for numeric programming, and these are the kinds of issues we have to deal with. BTW, if you search for numerical programming code online, you will often see the use of the CGFloat type (which suffers from Objective-C’s naming conventions and limitations, which we’ll learn more about later), but that only provides support for one of float or double (depending on the system you’re running on). The fact that CGFloat exists at all in the Linux port of Swift is rather odd, because it was only created for Apple-specific compatibility reasons; it is almost certainly not something you’ll be wanting to use. Resolving this problem is actually fairly straightforward, and is a good example of how to use protocols. In BaseMath I’ve created the SupportsBasicMath protocol, which is extracted below: Then we tell Swift that Float conforms to this protocol, and we also provide implementations for the methods: Now in our library code we can simply use SupportsBasicMath as a constraint on a generic type, and we can call all the usual math functions directly. (Swift already provides support for the basic math operators in a transparent way, so we don’t have to do anything to make that work.) If you’re thinking that it must have been a major pain to write all those wrapper functions, then don’t worry—there’s a handy trick I used that meant the computer did it for me. The trick is to use gyb templates to auto-generate the methods using python code, like so: If you look at the Swift code base itself, you’ll see that this trick is used liberally, for example to define the basic math functions themselves. Hopefully in some future version we’ll see generic math functions in the standard library. In the meantime, just use SupportsBasicMath from BaseMath. Performance tricks and results One of the really cool things about Swift is that wrappers like the above have no run-time overhead. As you see, I’ve marked them with the inlinable attribute, which tells LLVM that it’s OK to replace calls to this function with the actual function body. This kind of zero-overhead abstraction is one of the most important features of C++; it’s really amazing to see it in such a concise and expressive language as Swift. Let’s do some experiments to see how this works, by running a simple benchmark: adding 2.0 to every element of an array of 1,000,000 floats in Swift. Assuming we’ve already allocated an array of appropriate size, we can use this code (note: benchmark is a simple function in BaseMath that times a block of code): Doing a million floating point additions in a millisecond is pretty impressive! But look what happens if we try one minor tweak: It’s nearly the same code, yet twice as fast - so what happened there? BaseMath adds the p property to Array, which returns a pointer to the array’s memory; so the above code is using a pointer, instead of the array object itself. Normally, because Swift has to handle the complexities of COW, it can’t fully optimize a loop like this. But by using a pointer instead, we skip those checks, and Swift can run the code at full speed. Note that due to copy-on-write it’s possible for the array to move if you assign to it, and it can also move if you do things such as resize it; therefore, you should only grab the pointer at the time you need it. The above code is still pretty clunky, but Swift makes it easy for us to provide an elegant and idiomatic interface. I added a new map method to Array, which puts the result into a preallocated array, instead of creating a new array. Here’s the definition of map (it uses some typealiases from BaseMath to make it a bit more concise): As you can see, it’s plain Swift code. The cool thing is that this lets us now use this clear and concise code, and still get the same performance we saw before: I think this is quite remarkable; we’ve been able to create a simple API which is just as fast as the pointer code, but to the class user that complexity is entirely hidden away. Of course, we don’t really know how fast this is yet, because we haven’t compared to C. So let’s do that next. One of the really nice things about Swift is how easy it is to add C code that you write, or use external C libraries. To use our own C code, we simply create a new package with Swift Package Manager (SPM), pop a .c file in its Sources directory, and a .h file in its Sources/include directory. (Oh and BTW, in BaseMath that .h file is entirely auto-generated from the .c file using gyb!) This level of C integration is extremely rare, and the implications are huge. It means that every C library out there, including all the functionality built in to your operating system, optimized math libraries, Tensorflow’s underlying C API, and so forth can all be accessed from Swift directly. And if you for any reason need to drop in to C yourself, then you can, without any manual interfacing code or any extra build step. Here’s our sum function in C (this is the float version—the double version is similar, and the two are generated from a single gyb template): To call this, we need to pass in the count as an Int32; BaseMath adds the c property to arrays for this purpose (alternatively you could simply use numericCast(ar1.count). Here’s the result: It’s basically the same speed as Swift. This is a very encouraging result, because it shows that we can get the same performance as optimized C using Swift. And not just any Swift, but idiomatic and concise Swift, which (thanks to methods like reduce and map can look much closer to math equations than most languages that are this fast. Let now try a different experiment: taking the sum of our array. Here’s the most idiomatic Swift code: …and here’s the same thing with a loop: Let’s see if our earlier pointer trick helps this time too: Well that’s odd. It’s not any faster, which suggests that it isn’t getting the best possible performance. Let’s again switch to C and see how it performs there: Here’s the result: I compared this performance to Intel’s optimized Performance Libraries version of sum and found this is even faster than their hand-optimized assembler! To get this to perform better than Swift, I did however need to know a little trick (provided by LLVM’s vectorization docs), which is to compile with the -ffast-math flag. For numeric programming like this, I recommend you always use at least these flags (this is all I’ve used for these experiments, although you can also add -march=native, and change the optimization level from O2 for Ofast): Why do we need this flag? Because strictly speaking, addition is not associative, due to the quirks of floating point. But this is, in practice, very unlikely to be something that most people will care about! By default, clang will use the “strictly correct” behavior, which means it can’t vectorize the loop with SIMD. But with -ffast-math we’re telling the compiler that we don’t mind treating addition as associative (amongst other things), so it will vectorize the loop, giving us a 4x improvement in speed. The other important thing to remember for good performance in C code like this is to ensure you have const marked on everything that won’t change, as I’ve done in the code above. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to currently be a way to get Swift to vectorize any reduction. So for now at least, we have to use C to get good performance here. This is not a limitation of the language itself, it’s just an optimization that the Swift team hasn’t gotten around to implementing yet. The good news is: BaseMath adds the sum method to Array, which uses this optimized C version, so if you use BaseMath, you get this performance automatically. So the result of test #1 is: failure. We didn’t manage to get pure Swift to reach the same performance as C. But at least we got a nice C version we can call from Swift. Let’s move on to another test and see if we can get better performance by avoiding doing any reductions. So what if we want to do a function reduction, such as sum-of-squares? Ideally, we’d like to be able to combine our map style above with sum, but without getting the performance penalty of Swift’s unoptimized reductions. To make this work, the trick is to use temporary storage. If we use our map function above to store the result in preallocated memory, we can then pass that to our C sum implementation. We want something like a static variable for storing our preallocated memory, but then we’d have to deal with locking to handle contention between threads. To avoid that, we can use thread local storage (TLS). Like most languages, Swift provides TLS functionality; however rather than make it part of the core language (like, say, C#), it provides a class, which we can access through Thread.current.threadDictionary. BaseMath adds the preallocated memory to this dictionary, and makes it available internally as tempStore; this is then the internal implementation of unary function reduction (there are also binary and ternary versions available): We can then use this as follows: This provides a nice speedup over the regular Swift reduce version: Here’s the C version: Let’s try it out: C implementations of sum for all standard unary math functions are made available by BaseMath, so you can call the above implementation by simply using: In summary: whilst the Swift version using temporary storage (and calling C for just the final sum) was twice as fast as just using reduce, using C is another 3 or more times faster. The warts As you can see, there’s a lot to like about numeric programming in Swift. You can get both the performance of optimized C with the convenience of automatic memory management and elegant syntax. The most concise and flexible language I’ve used is Python. And the fastest I’ve used is C (well… actually it’s FORTRAN, but let’s not go there.) So how does it stack up against these high bars? The very idea that we could compare a single language to the flexibility of Python and the speed of C is an amazing achievement itself! Overall, my view is that in general it takes a bit more code in Swift than Python to write the stuff I want to write, and there’s fewer ways to abstract common code out. For instance, I use decorators a lot in Python, and use them to write loads of code for me. I use *args and **kwargs a lot (the new dynamic features in Swift can provide some of that functionality, but it doesn’t go as far). I zip multiple variables together at once (in Swift you have to zip pairs of pairs for multiple variables, and then use nested parens to destructure them). And then there’s the code you have to write to get your types all lined up nicely. I also find Swift’s performance is harder to reason about and optimize than C. C has its own quirks around performance (such as the need to use const and sometimes even requiring restrict to help the compiler) but they’re generally better documented, better understood, and more consistent. Also, C compilers such as clang and gcc provide powerful additional capabilities using pragmas such as omp and loop which can even auto-parallelize code. Having said that, Swift closer to achieving the combination of Python’s expressiveness and C’s speed than any other language I’ve used. There are some issues still to be aware of. One thing to consider is that protocol-oriented programming requires a very different way to doing things to what you’re probably used to. In the long run, that’s probably a good thing, since learning new programming styles can help you become a better programmer; but it could lead to some frustrations for the first few weeks. This issue is particularly challenging because Swift’s compiler often has no idea where the source of a protocol type problem really is, and its ability to guess types is still pretty flaky. So extremely minor changes, such as changing the name of a type, or changing where a type constraint is defined, can change something that used to work, into something that spits out four screens for error messages. My advice is to try to create minimal versions of your type structures in a standalone test file, and get things working there first. Note, however, that ease of use generally requires compromises. Python is particularly easy, because it’s perfectly happy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. Swift at least makes sure you first know how to untie your shoelaces. Chris told me: the pitch when building Swift in the first place was that the important thing to optimize for is the “end to end time to get to a correct implementation of whatever you’re trying to do”. This includes both time to pound out code, time to debug it, and time to refactor/maintain it if you’re making a change to an existing codebase. I don’t have enough experience yet, but I suspect that on this metric Swift will turn out to be a great performer. There are some parts of Swift which I’m not a fan of: the compromises made due to Apple’s history with Objective-C, it’s packaging system, it’s community, and the lack of C++ support. Or to be more precise: it is largely parts of the Swift ecosystem that I’m not a fan of. The language itself is quite delightful. And the ecosystem can be fixed. But, for now, this is the situation that Swift programmers have to deal with, so let’s look at each of these issues in turn. Objective-C is a language developed in the 1980’s designed to bring some of the object-oriented features of Smalltalk to C. It was a very successful project, and was picked by NeXT as the basis for programming NeXTSTEP in 1988. With NeXT’s acquisition by Apple, it became the primary language for coding for Apple devices. Today, it’s showing its age, and the constraints imposed by the decision to make it a strict superset of C. For instance, Objective-C doesn’t support true function overloading. Instead, it uses something called selectors, which are simply required keyword arguments. Each function’s full name is defined by the concatenation of the function name with all the selector names. This idea is also used by AppleScript, which provides something very similar to allow the name print to mean different things in different contexts: AppleScript in turn inherited this idea from HyperTalk, a language created in 1987 for Apple’s much-loved (and missed) HyperCard program. Given all this history, it’s not surprising that today the idea of required named arguments is something that most folks at Apple have quite an attachment to. Perhaps more importantly, it provided a useful compromise for the designers of Objective-C, since they were able to avoid adding true function overloading to the language, keeping close compatibility with C. Unfortunately, this constraint impacts Swift today, over 40 years after the situation that led to its introduction in Objective-C. Swift does provide true function overloading, which is particularly important in numeric programming, where you really don’t want to have to create whole separate functions for floats, doubles, and complex numbers (and quaternions, etc…). But by default all keyword names are still required, which can lead to verbose and visually cluttered code. And Apple’s style guide strongly promotes this style of coding; their Objective-C and Swift, style guides closely mirror each other, rather than allowing programmers to really leverage Swift’s unique capabilities. You can opt out of requiring named arguments by prefixing a parameter name with _, which BaseMath uses everywhere that optional arguments are not needed. Another area where things get rather verbose is when it comes to working with Foundation, Apple’s main class library, which is also used by Objective-C. Swift’s standard library is missing a lot of functionality that you’ll need, so you’ll often need to turn to Foundation to get stuff done. But you won’t enjoy it. After the pleasure of using such a elegantly designed language as Swift, there’s something particularly sad about using it to access as unwieldy a library as Foundation. For instance, Swift’s standard library doesn’t provide a builtin way to format floats with fixed precision, so I decided to add that functionality to my SupportsBasicMath protocol. Here’s the code: The fact that we can add this functionality to Float and Double by writing such an extension is really cool, as is the ability to handle failed conversions with Swift’s ?? operator. But look at the verbosity of the code to actually use the NumberFormatter class from Foundation! And it doesn’t even accept Float or Double, but the awkward NSNumber type from Objective-C (which is itself a clunky workaround for the lack of generics in Objective-C). So I had to add an nsNumber property to SupportsBasicMath to do the casting. The Swift language itself does help support more concise styles, such as the {f($0)} style of closures. Concision is important for numeric programming, since it lets us write our code to reflect more closely the math that we’re implementing, and to understand the whole equation at a glance. For a masterful exposition of this (and much more), see Iverson’s Turing Award lecture Notation as a Tool for Thought. Objective-C also doesn’t have namespaces, which means that each project picks some 2 or 3 letter prefix which it adds to all symbols. Most of the Foundation library still uses names inherited from Objective-C, so you’ll find yourself using types like CGFloat and functions like CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent. (Every time I type one of these symbols I’m sure a baby unicorn cries out in pain…) The Swift team made the surprising decision to use an Objective-C implementation of Foundation and other libraries when running Swift on Apple devices, but to use native Swift libraries on Linux. As a result, you will sometimes see different behavior on each platform. For instance, the unit test framework on Apple devices is unable to find and run tests that are written as protocol extensions, but they work fine under Linux. Overall, I feel like the constraints and history of Objective-C seem to bleed in to Swift programming too often, and each time it happens, there’s a real friction that pops up. Over time, however, these issues seem to be reducing, and I hope that in the future we’ll see Swift break out from the Objective-C shackles more and more. For instance, perhaps we’ll see a real effort to create idiomatic Swift replacements for some of the Objective-C class libraries. I’ve been using Python a lot over the last couple of years, and one thing that always bothered me is that too many people in the Python community have only ever used that one language (since it’s a great beginners’ language and is widely taught to under-graduates). As a result, there’s a lack of awareness that different languages can do things in different ways, and each choice has its own pros and cons. Instead, in the Python world, there’s a tendency for folks to think that the Python way is the one true way. I’m seeing something similar in Swift, but in some ways it’s even worse: most Swift programmers got their start as Objective-C programmers. So a lot of the discussion you see online is from Objective-C programmers writing Swift in a style that closely parallels how things are done in Objective-C. And nearly all of them do nearly all of their programming in Xcode (which is almost certainly my least favorite IDE, except for its wonderful Swift Playgrounds feature), so a lot of advice you’ll find online shows how to solve Swift problems by getting Xcode to do things for you, rather than writing the code yourself. Most Swift programmers are writing iOS apps, so you’ll also find a lot of guidance on how to lay out a mobile GUI, but there’s almost no information about things like how to distribute command line programs for Linux, or how to compile static libraries. In general, because the Linux support for Swift is still so new, there’s not much information available how how to use it, and many libraries and tools don’t work under Linux. Most of the time when I was tracking down problems with my protocol conformance, or trying to figure out how to optimize some piece of code, the only information I could find would be a mailing list discussion amongst Apple’s Swift language team. These discussions tend to focus on the innards of the compiler and libraries, rather than how to use them. So there’s a big missing middle ground between app developers discussing how to use Xcode and Swift language implementation discussing how to modify the compiler. There is a good community forming now around around the Discorse forums at [https://forums.swift.org/], which hopefully over time will turn in to a useful knowledge base for Swift programmers. Swift has an officially sanctioned package system, called Swift Package Manager (SPM). Unfortunately, it’s one of the worst packaging systems I’ve ever used. I’ve noticed that nearly every language, when creating a package manager, reinvents everything from scratch, and fails to leverage all the successes and failures of previous attempts. Swift follows this unfortunate pattern. There are some truly excellent packaging systems out there. The best, perhaps, was and still is Perl’s CPAN, which includes an international automated testing service that tests all packages on a wide range of systems, deeply integrates documentation, has excellent tutorials, and much more. Another terrific (and more modern) system is conda, which not only handles language-specific libraries (with a focus on Python) but also handles automatically installing compatible system libraries and binaries too—and manages to do everything in your home directory so you don’t even need root access. And it works well on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It can handle distribution of both compiled modules, or source. SPM, on the other hand, has none of the benefits of any of these systems. Even though Swift is a compiled language, it doesn’t provide a way to create or distribute compiled packages, which means users of your package will have to install all the pre-requisites for building it. And SPM doesn’t let you describe how to build your package, so (for instance) if you use BaseMath it’s up to you to remember to add the flags required for good performance when you build something that uses it. The way dependencies is handled is really awkward. Git tags or branches are used for dependencies, and there’s no easy way to switch between a local dev build and the packaged version (like, for instance the -e flag to pip or the conda develop command). Instead, you have to modify the package file to change the location of the dependency, and remember to switch it back before you commit. It would take far too long to document all the deficiencies of SPM; instead, you can work on the assumption that any useful feature you’ve appreciated from whatever packaging system you’re using now probably won’t be in SPM. Hopefully someone will get around to setting up a conda-based system for Swift and we can all just start using that instead… Also, installation of Swift is a mess. On Linux, for instance, only Ubuntu is supported, and different versions require different installers. On Mac, Swift versions are tied to Xcode versions in a confusing and awkward way, and command line and Xcode versions are somewhat separate, yet somewhat linked, in ways that make my brain hurt. Again, conda seems like it could provide the best option to avoid this, since a single conda package can be used to support any flavor of Linux, and Mac can also be supported in the same way. If the work was done to get Swift on to conda, then it would be possible to say just conda install swift on any system, and everything would just work. This would also provide a solution for versioning, isolated environments, and complex dependency tracking. (If you’re on Windows, you are, for now, out of luck. There’s an old unofficial port to Cygwin. And Swift runs fine on the Windows Subsystem for Linux. But no official native Windows Swift as yet, sadly. But there is some excellent news on this front: a hero named Saleem Abdulrasool has made great strides towards making a complete native port entirely indepdently, and in the last few days it has gotten to a point where the vast majority of the Swift test suite passes.) Whilst Apple went with Objective-C for their “C with objects” solution, the rest of the world went with C++. Eventually, the Objective-C extensions were also added to C++, to create “Objective-C++”, but there was no attempt to unify the concepts across the languages, so the resulting language is a mutant with many significant restrictions. However, there is a nice subset of the language that gets around some of the biggest limitations of C; for instance you can use function overloading, and have access to a rich standard library. Unfortunately, Swift can’t interface with C++ at all. Even something as simple as a header file containing overloaded functions will cause Swift language interop to fail. This is a big problem for numeric programmers, because many of the most useful numeric libraries today are written in C++. For instance, the ATen library at the heart of PyTorch is C++. There are good reasons that numeric programmers lean towards C++: it provides the features that are needed for concise and expressive solutions to numeric programming problems. For example, Julia programmers are (rightly) proud of how easy it is to support the critical broadcasting functionality in their language, which they have documented in the Julia challenge. In C++ this challenge has an elegant and fast solution. You won’t find something like this in pure C, however. So this means that a large and increasing number of the most important building blocks for numeric programming are out of bounds for Swift programmers. This is a serious problem. (You can write plain C wrappers for a C++ class, and then create a Swift class that uses those wrappers, but that’s a very big and very boring job which I’m not sure many people are likely to embark on.) Other languages have shown potential ways around this. For instance, C# on Windows provides “It Just Works” (IJW) interfacing with C++/CLI, a superset of C++ with support for .Net. Even more interestingly, the CPPSharp project leverages LLVM to auto-generate a C# wrapper for C++ code with no calling overhead. Solving this problem will not be easy for Swift. But because Swift uses LLVM, and already interfaces with C (and Objective-C) it is perhaps better placed to come up with a great solution than nearly any other language. Except, perhaps, for Julia, since they’ve already done this. Twice. Conclusion Swift is a really interesting language which can support fast, concise, expressive numeric programming. The Swift for Tensorflow project may be the best opportunity for creating a programming language where differentiable programming is a first class citizen. Swift also lets us easily interface with C code and libraries. However, Swift on Linux is still immature, the packaging system is weak, installation is clunky, and the libraries suffer from some rough spots due to the historical ties to Objective-C. So how does it stack up? In the data science world, we’re mainly stuck using either R (which is the least pleasant language I’ve ever used, but with the most beautifully designed data munging and plotting libraries anywhere) or Python (which is painfully slow, very hard to parallelize, but is extremely expressive and has the best deep learning libraries available). We really need another option. Something that is fast, flexible, and provides good interop with existing libraries. Overall, the Swift language itself looks to be exactly what we need, but much of the ecosystem needs to be replaced or at least dramatically leveled-up. There is no data science ecosystem to speak of, although the S4TF project seems likely to create some important pieces. This is a really good place to be spending time if you’re interested in being part of something that has a huge amount of potential, and has some really great people working to make that happen, and you are OK with helping smooth out the warts along the way. |
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Category:Markov models Subcategories This category has the following 3 subcategories, out of 3 total. Pages in category "Markov models" The following 63 pages are in this category, out of 63 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2019-01-02-one-year-of-deep-learning.html] | [TOKENS: 1597] |
One year of deep learning Sylvain Gugger January 2, 2019 On this page My resolution for 2018 was to get into deep learning. I had stumbled upon a website called fast.ai in October 2017 after reading an article from the New York Times describing the shortage of people capable of training a deep learning model. It sounds a bit clichéd to say it changed my life, but I could hardly have imagined that, one year later, I would be helping prepare the next version of this course from behind the scenes. So in this article, I’ll tell you a little bit about my personal journey into Deep Learning, and I will share some advice which I feel could have been useful to me six months ago. Who am I and where do I come from? My background is mostly in Math. I have a Master’s degree from a French University; I started a PhD but stopped after six months because I found it too depressing, and went on to teach undergrads for seven years in Paris. I’m a self-taught coder, my father having had the good idea to put an introduction to ‘Basic’ in my hands when I was 13. My husband got relocated to New York City, so I moved there three and a half years ago, and became half stay-at-home dad, half textbook writer for a publisher in France. When I first looked at fast.ai, I was curious about what the hype around Artificial Intelligence was all about, and I wanted to know if I could understand what seemed to only be accessible to a few geniuses. I have to confess that I almost didn’t start the course; the claim it could explain Deep Learning to anyone with just one year of experience of coding and high school math sounded very suspicious to me, and I was wondering if it wasn’t all bogus (spoiler alert: it’s not). I did decide to go with it though; I had finished my latest books and finding seven hours a week to work the course while my little boys napped didn’t seem too much. Although I started the first version of the MOOC with a clear advantage in math, I struggled a lot with what I call the geeky stuff. I’m a Windows user and I had never launched a terminal before. The setup took me the better part of a week before I was finally able to train my own dogs and cats classifier. It felt like some form of torture every time I had to run some commands in a terminal (that still bit hasn’t changed that much!) If you’re new to the field and struggling with a part (or all) of it, remember no one had it easy. There’s always something you won’t know and that will be a challenge, but you will overcome it if you persevere. And with time, it will become easier, at least a little bit… I still need help with half my bash commands, and broke the docs and course website twice during the first lesson. Fortunately, everyone was too busy watching Jeremy to notice. Do you need advanced math to do deep learning? The short answer is no. The long answer is no, and anyone telling you the opposite just wants to scare you. You might need advanced math in some areas of theoretical research in Deep Learning, but there’s room for everyone at the table. To be able to train a model in practice, you only need three things: have a sense of what a derivative is, know log and exp for the error functions, and know what a matrix product is. And you can learn all of this in a very short amount of time, with multiple resources online. In the course, Jeremy recommends Khan Academy for learning about derivatives, log, and exp, and 3 Blue 1 Brown for learning about matrix products. In my opinion, the one mathy (it’s a bit at the intersection of math and code) thing you’ll really need to master (or at least get as comfortable with as you can) is broadcasting. Make your own boot camp, if you’re serious about it After I finished the first part of the course, it was clear to me that I wanted to work in this field (hence the good resolution). I contemplated various boot camps that were promising to turn me into a Data Scientist in exchange for a substantial tuition fee. I found enough testimonials online to scare me a bit from it, so fortunately I quickly gave up on that idea. There are enough free (or cheap) resources online to teach you all you need, so as long as you have the self-discipline, you can make your own boot camp. The best of all being the courses from fast.ai of course (but I’m a bit biased since I work there now ;) ). I thought I’d never be selected to join the International Fellowship for the second version of the second part of the course so I was a tad unprepared when the acceptance email came in. I booked a coworking space to distance myself from the craziness of a baby and a toddler at home, hired an army of sitters in a rush until we found a nanny, then worked from 9 to 5 each day, plus the evenings, on the course materials. I thought I’d follow other MOOCs, but with all the challenges Jeremy left on the forum, and the vibrant community there, I never got the time to look elsewhere. Even though the course is intended for people to spend seven hours a week on homework, there is definitely enough to keep you busy for far longer, especially in the second part. If you’re serious about switching carreers to Deep Learning, you should spend the seven weeks working your ass off on this course. And if you can afford it money-wise/family-wise, fly yourself to San Francisco to attend in person and go every day to the study group at USF. If you can’t, find other people in your city following the course (or start your own group). In any case, be active on the forum, not just to ask questions when you have a bug, but also to help other people with their code. Show what you can do I’m shy and I hate networking. Those who have met me in person know I can’t chitchat for the love of God. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways you can sell yourself to potential employers behind the safety of your computer. Here are a few things that can help: I was amazed and surprised to get several job offers before the course even ended. Then, Jeremy mentioned he was going to rebuild the library entirely and I offered to help. One thing led to another one and he managed to get a sponsorship from AWS for me to be a Research Scientist at fast.ai. Behind the mirror In my opinion, there are always three stages in learning. First you understand something abstractly, then you can explain it, and eventually you manage to actually do it. This is why it’s so important to see if you can redo by yourself the code you see in the courses. As far as Deep Learning is concerned, following the course was the first stage for me; writing blog posts, notebooks or answering questions on the forum was the second stage; re-building the library from scratch with Jeremy was the third one. I have learned even more in those past few months than during the time when I was following the courses. Some of it in areas I had discarded a bit too quickly … and a lot of it by refactoring pieces of codes under Jeremy’s guidance until we got to the outcome you can see today. Building a fully integrated framework means you have to implement everything, so you need to master every part of the process. All in all, this has been one of the years in which I’ve learned the most in my life. I’ll be forever thankful to Rachel and Jeremy for creating this amazing course, and I’m very proud to add my little stone to it. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCity] | [TOKENS: 745] |
Contents GameCity GameCity is an independent organisation based in Nottingham, UK, which has worked since 2006 with the support of Nottingham Trent University to bring videogames to the widest possible audiences. This has been done through an annual GameCity Festival, described as the "Sundance of the video games world", the GameCity Prize since 2011, and the National Videogame Arcade since 2015. Each year, GameCity hosts talks and presentations from individuals and companies working in the games industry. GameCity Festivals The GameCity Festival has run annually in Nottingham since 2006. Gamecity 3 was held over Halloween 2008. To coincide with this, GameCity arranged a successful world record attempt at the largest number of people to dress as zombies in one place. The record was set to 1227 people, although even more 'unregistered zombies' were present at the attempt. Also during the 2008 event, the National Videogame Archive for the UK was launched with the Save the Videogame campaign. This was led by the recording of the first public Director Commentary event, with Martin Hollis and David Doak playing Goldeneye 64 live. GameCity Squared took place from 27 to 31 October 2009. Events in 2009 included: Brickstock (a LEGO Rock Band celebration); Elite: Paper Universe - which celebrated 25 years of Elite by bringing together David Braben, Ian Bell, Robert Holdstock and others involved in its creation; Crysis: LIVE - a large scale re-enactment of Crysis; and various industry talks from Jagex and Masaya Matsuura. The final location of the Keita Takahashi-designed playground was also revealed as being Woodthorpe Grange Park in Nottingham. GameCity 7 took place in Nottingham from 20 to 27 October 2012. There were several events held over the 8 day festival, including keynotes from Leigh Alexander, Phil Fish, Adam Saltsman, Ed Stern and many more. The festival also had the first UK showing of the LEGO: Lord of the Rings game, demonstrated by LEGO's Creative Director Jonathan Smith. A World Record was broken on the final day of the festival, as GameCity attempted to host the World's Largest Practical Science experiment. 292 people participated in the event, succeeding the previous record of 276. The GameCity Prize was announced on 15 September 2011. As part of the annual GameCity Festival it is awarded for a game's "accomplishments and contribution to popular culture". Minecraft won the first GameCity Prize in 2011. National Videogame Arcade In March 2015, GameCity opened the UK's first permanent cultural centre for videogames. Located in the centre of Nottingham, the National Videogame Arcade is "a place where the whole family can discover videogames, play videogames and make videogames". Spread across five floors, the NVA has three floors of playable galleries showcasing games both old and new, and exploring videogame culture through unique interactive exhibits. Alongside this, the NVA further features a floor dedicated to education and the National Curriculum, allowing students a hands-on experience of game-making through a variety of workshops. In 2016, the NVA in Nottingham fell into cash flow difficulties. An eleventh hour investment by a director-led consortium, led by director Iain Simons, saved all 40 jobs. The destination was being taken into administration in August 2016. In 2018, the NVA closed down in Nottingham. The same team has since launched the UK National Videogame Museum in Sheffield. References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#cite_ref-24] | [TOKENS: 3525] |
Contents Markus Persson Markus Alexej Persson (/ˈpɪərsən/ ⓘ PEER-sən, Swedish: [ˈmǎrːkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ⓘ; born 1 June 1979), known by the pseudonym Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is the creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history. He founded the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson began developing video games at an early age. His commercial success began after he published an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over four million copies. After this point Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred his creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014 Persson announced his intention to leave Mojang, and in November of that year the company was sold to Microsoft reportedly for US$2.5 billion, which made him a billionaire. Since 2016 several of Persson's posts on Twitter regarding feminism, race, and transgender rights have caused public controversies. He has been described as "an increasingly polarizing figure, tweeting offensive statements regarding race, the LGBTQ community, gender, and other topics." In an effort to distance itself from Persson, Microsoft removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration. In 2015 he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain, which was relaunched in 2024 as Bitshift Entertainment. Early life Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother, Ritva, and a Swedish father, Birger, on 1 June 1979. He has one sister. He grew up in Edsbyn until he was seven years old, when his family moved back to Stockholm. In Edsbyn, Persson's father worked for the railroad, and his mother was a nurse. He spent much time outdoors in Edsbyn, exploring the woods with his friends. When Persson was about seven years old, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with their mother. His father moved to a cabin in the countryside. Persson said in an interview that they experienced food insecurity around once a month. Persson lost contact with his father for several years after the divorce. According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies. While his father had somewhat recovered during Persson's early life, his father relapsed, contributing to the divorce. His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home. He had gained interest in video games at an early age. His father was "a really big nerd", who built his own modem and taught Persson to use the family's Commodore 128. On it, Persson played bootleg games and loaded in various type-in programs from computer magazines with the help of his sister. The first game he purchased with his own money was The Bard's Tale. He began programming on his father's Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven. He produced his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game. By 1994 Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. Persson, although introverted, was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly had only one friend. He spent most of his spare time with games and programming at home. He managed to reverse-engineer the Doom engine, which he continued to take great pride in as of 2014[update]. He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student. Career Persson started his career working as a web designer. He later found employment at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson. The pair worked in their spare time to build the 2006 video game Wurm Online. The game was released through a new entity, "Mojang Specifications AB". Persson left the project in late 2007. As Persson wanted to reuse the name "Mojang", Jansson agreed to rename the company to Onetoofree AB. Between 2004 and 2009 Persson worked as a game developer for Midasplayer (later known as King). There, he worked as a programmer, mostly building browser games made in Flash. He later worked as a programmer for jAlbum. Prior to creating Minecraft, Persson developed multiple, small games. He also entered a number of game design competitions and participated in discussions on the TIGSource forums, a web forum for independent game developers. One of Persson's more notable personal projects was called RubyDung, an isometric three-dimensional base-building game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress. While working on RubyDung, Persson experimented with a first-person view mode similar to that found in Dungeon Keeper. However, he felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode. In 2009 Persson found inspiration in Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game. Infiniminer heavily influenced his future work on RubyDung, and was behind Persson's reasoning for returning the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals to the game. RubyDung is the earliest known Minecraft prototype created by Persson. On 17 May 2009 Persson released the original edition (later called "Classic version") of Minecraft on the TIGSource forums. He regularly updated the game based on feedback from TIGSource users. Persson released several new versions of Minecraft throughout 2009 and 2010, going through several phases of development including Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev. On 30 June 2010 Persson released the game's Alpha version. While working on the pre-Alpha version of Minecraft, Persson continued working at jAlbum. In 2010, after the release and subsequent success of Minecraft's Alpha version, Persson moved from a full-time role to a part-time role at jAlbum. He left jAlbum later that same year. In September 2010 Persson travelled to Valve Corporation's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, United States, where he took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell. Persson was subsequently offered a job at Valve, which he turned down in order to continue work on Minecraft. On 20 December 2010 Minecraft moved into its beta phase and began expanding to other platforms, including mobile. In January 2011 Minecraft reached one million registered accounts. Six months afterwards, it reached ten million. The game has sold over four million copies by 7 November 2011. Mojang held the first Minecon from 18 to 19 November 2011 to celebrate its full release, and subsequently made it an annual event. Following this, on 11 December 2011, Persson transferred creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and began working on another game title, 0x10c, although he reportedly abandoned the project around 2013. In 2013 Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million and profits of $129 million. Persson has stated that, due to the intense media attention and public pressure, he became exhausted with running Minecraft and Mojang. In a September 2014 blog post he shared his realization that he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. In June 2014 Persson tweeted "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig", reportedly partly as a joke. Persson controlled a 71% stake in Mojang at the time. The offer attracted significant interest from Activision Blizzard, EA, and Microsoft. Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted to purchase the game as a "tax dodge" to turn their taxable excess liquid cash into other assets. In September 2014 Microsoft agreed to purchase Mojang for $2.5 billion, making Persson a billionaire. He then left the company after the deal was finalised in November. Since leaving Mojang, Persson has worked on several small projects. On 23 June 2014 he founded a company with Porsér called Rubberbrain AB; the company had no games by 2021, despite spending SEK 60 million. The company was relaunched as Bitshift Entertainment, LLC on 28 March 2024. Persson expressed interest in creating a new video game studio in 2020, and in developing virtual reality games. He has also since created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party()", which uses extensive visual effects and has been hosted in multiple cities. At the beginning of 2025 Persson decided to create a spiritual successor to Minecraft, referred to as "Minecraft 2", in response to the results of a poll on X. However, after speaking to his team, he shortly went against this in favour of developing the other choice on his Twitter poll, a roguelike titled Levers and Chests. Games Persson's most popular creation is the survival sandbox game Minecraft, which was first publicly available on 17 May 2009 and fully released on 18 November 2011. Persson left his job as a game developer to work on Minecraft full-time until completion. In early 2011, Mojang AB sold the one millionth copy of the game, several months later their second, and several more their third. Mojang hired several new staff members for the Minecraft team, while Persson passed the lead developer role to Jens Bergensten. He stopped working on Minecraft after a deal with Microsoft to sell Mojang for $2.5 billion. This brought his net worth to US$1.5 billion. Persson and Jakob Porsér came up with the idea for Scrolls including elements from board games and collectible card games. Persson noted that he will not be actively involved in development of the game and that Porsér will be developing it. Persson revealed on his Tumblr blog on 5 August 2011 that he was being sued by a Swedish law firm representing Bethesda Softworks over the trademarked name of Scrolls, claiming that it conflicted with their The Elder Scrolls series of games. On 17 August 2011 Persson challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome of the naming dispute. On 27 September 2011 Persson confirmed that the lawsuit was going to court. ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda Softworks, announced the lawsuit's settlement in March 2012. The settlement allowed Mojang to continue using the Scrolls trademark. In 2018, Scrolls was made available free of charge and renamed to Caller's Bane. Cliffhorse is a humorous game programmed in two hours using the Unity game engine and free assets. The game took inspiration from Skyrim's physics engine, "the more embarrassing minimum-effort Greenlight games", Goat Simulator, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The game was released to Microsoft Windows systems as an early access and honourware game on the first day of E3 2014, instructing users to donate Dogecoin to "buy" the game before downloading it. The game accumulated over 280,000 dogecoins. Following the end to his involvement with Minecraft, Persson began pre-production of an alternate reality space game set in the distant future in March 2012. On April Fools' Day Mojang launched a satirical website for Mars Effect (parody of Mass Effect), citing the lawsuit with Bethesda as an inspiration. However, the gameplay elements remained true and on 4 April, Mojang revealed 0x10c (pronounced "Ten to the C") as a space sandbox title. Persson officially halted game production in August 2013. However, C418, the composer of the game's soundtrack (as well as that of Minecraft), released an album of the work he had made for the game. In 2013, Persson made a free game called Shambles in the Unity game engine. Persson has also participated in several Ludum Dare 48-hour game making competitions. Personal life In 2011 Persson married Elin Zetterstrand, whom he had dated for four years before. Zetterstrand was a former moderator on the Minecraft forums. They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her. On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce. The divorce was finalised later that year. On 14 December 2011 Persson's father committed suicide with a handgun after drinking heavily. In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father: When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft, he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him. Persson later admitted that he himself suffered from depression and various highs and lows in his mood. Persson has criticised the stance of large game companies on piracy. He once stated that "piracy is not theft", viewing unauthorised downloads as potential future customers. Persson stated himself to be a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden in 2011. He is also a member of Mensa. He has donated to numerous charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle and raised US$458,248 for charity. He also donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2012. In 2011 he gave $3 million in dividends back to Mojang employees. According to Forbes, his net worth in 2023 was around $1.2 billion. In 2014 Persson was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sweden. Around 2014, he lived in a multi-level penthouse in Östermalm, Stockholm, an area he described as "where the rich people live". In December 2014 Persson purchased a home in Trousdale Estates, a neighbourhood in Beverly Hills, California, in the United States, for $70 million, a record sales price for Beverly Hills at the time. Persson reportedly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the property. Persson began receiving criticism for political and social opinions he expressed on social media as early as 2016. November 30, 2017 In 2017, he proposed a heterosexual pride holiday, and wrote that those who opposed the idea "deserve to be shot." After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing, "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now." Later in the year, he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and called the video game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn a "cunt", although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement. He has described intersectional feminism as a "framework for bigotry" and the use of the word mansplaining as being sexist. Also in 2017, Persson tweeted that "It's okay to be white". Later that year, he stated that he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2019, he tweeted referencing QAnon, saying "Q is legit. Don't trust the media." Later in 2019, he tweeted in response to a pro-transgender internet meme that, "You are absolutely evil if you want to encourage delusion. What happened to not stigmatizing mental illness?" He then also promoted claims that people were fined for "using the wrong pronoun". However, after facing backlash, he tweeted a day afterwards that he had "no idea what [being trans is] like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as. Not because it's a cool choice, because it's a big step. I gues [sic] that's actually cool nvm". Later that year, Microsoft removed two mentions of Persson's name in the "19w13a" snapshot of Minecraft and did not invite him to the 10-year anniversary celebration of the game. A spokesperson for Microsoft stated that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang". He is still mentioned in the End Poem ("a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus").[citation needed] Awards References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenorland] | [TOKENS: 1142] |
Contents Kenorland Kenorland is a hypothetical Neoarchean supercontinent. If it existed, it would have been one of the earliest known supercontinents on Earth. It is thought to have formed during the Neoarchaean Era c. 2.72 billion years ago (2.72 Ga) by the accretion of Neoarchaean cratons and the formation of new continental crust. It comprised what later became Laurentia (the core of today's North America and Greenland), Baltica (today's Scandinavia and Baltic), Western Australia and Kalaharia. Swarms of volcanic dikes and their paleomagnetic orientation as well as the existence of similar stratigraphic sequences permit this reconstruction. The core of Kenorland, the Baltic/Fennoscandian Shield, traces its origins back to over 3.1 Ga. The Yilgarn craton (present-day Western Australia) contains zircon crystals in its crust that date back to 4.4 Ga. Kenorland was named after the Kenoran orogeny (also called the Algoman orogeny), which in turn was named after the town of Kenora, Ontario. Formation Kenorland was formed around 2.72 billion years ago (2.72 Ga) as a result of a series of accretion events and the formation of new continental crust. The accretion events are recorded in the greenstone belts of the Yilgarn craton as metamorphosed basalt belts and granitic domes accreted around the high grade metamorphic core of the Western Gneiss terrane, which includes elements of up to 3.2 Ga in age and some older portions, for example the Narryer Gneiss terrane. Breakup or disassembly Paleomagnetic studies show Kenorland was in generally low latitudes until tectonic magma-plume rifting began to occur between 2.48 Ga and 2.45 Ga. At 2.45 Ga the Baltic Shield was over the equator and was joined to Laurentia (the Canadian Shield) and both the Kola and Karelia cratons. The protracted breakup of Kenorland during the Late Neoarchaean and early Paleoproterozoic Era 2.48 to 2.10 Gya, during the Siderian and Rhyacian periods, is manifested by mafic dikes and sedimentary rift-basins and rift-margins on many continents. On early Earth, this type of bimodal deep mantle plume rifting was common in Archaean and Neoarchaean crust and continent formation. The geological time period surrounding the breakup of Kenorland is thought by many geologists to be the beginning of the transition point from the deep-mantle-plume method of continent formation in the Hadean to Early Archean (before the final formation of the Earth's inner core) to the subsequent two-layer core-mantle plate tectonics convection theory. However, the findings of an earlier continent, Ur, and a supercontinent of around 3.1 Gya, Vaalbara, indicate this transition period may have occurred much earlier. The Kola and Karelia cratons began to drift apart around 2.45 Gya, and by 2.4 Gya the Kola craton was at about 30 degrees south latitude and the Karelia craton was at about 15 degrees south latitude. Paleomagnetic evidence shows that at 2.45 Gya the Yilgarn craton (now the bulk of Western Australia) was not connected to Fennoscandia-Laurentia and was at about ~5 degrees south latitude.[citation needed] This implies that at 2.515 Gya an ocean existed between the Kola and Karelia cratons, and that by 2.45 Gya there was no longer a supercontinent. Also, there is speculation based on the rift margin spatial arrangements of Laurentia, that at some time during the breakup, the Slave and Superior cratons were not part of the supercontinent Kenorland, but, by then may have been two different Neoarchaean landmasses (supercratons) on opposite ends of a very large Kenorland. This is based on how drifting assemblies of various constituent pieces should flow reasonably together toward the amalgamation of the new subsequent continent. The Slave and Superior cratons now constitute the northwest and southeast portions of the Canadian Shield, respectively. The breakup of Kenorland was contemporary with the Huronian glaciation which persisted for up to 60 million years. The banded iron formations (BIF) show their greatest extent at this period, thus indicating a massive increase in oxygen build-up from an estimated 0.1% of the atmosphere to 1%. The rise in oxygen levels caused the virtual disappearance of the greenhouse gas methane (oxidized into carbon dioxide and water). The simultaneous breakup of Kenorland generally increased continental rainfall everywhere, thus increasing erosion and further reducing the other greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. With the reduction in greenhouse gases, and with solar output being less than 85% its current power, this led to a runaway Snowball Earth scenario, where average temperatures planet-wide plummeted to below freezing. Despite the anoxia indicated by the BIF, photosynthesis continued, stabilizing climates at new levels during the second part of the Proterozoic Era. References Bibliography Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwana] | [TOKENS: 7262] |
Contents Gondwana Gondwana (/ɡɒnˈdwɑːnə/ gond-WAHN-ə; Sanskrit: [goːɳɖɐʋɐnɐ]) was a large landmass, sometimes referred to as a supercontinent. The remnants of Gondwana make up around two-thirds of today's continental area, including South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Zealandia, Arabia, and the Indian subcontinent. Gondwana was formed by the accretion of several cratons (large stable blocks of the Earth's crust), beginning c. 800 to 650 Ma with the East African Orogeny, the collision of India and Madagascar with East Africa, and culminating in c. 600 to 530 Ma with the overlapping Brasiliano and Kuunga orogenies, the collision of South America with Africa, and the addition of Australia and Antarctica, respectively. Eventually, Gondwana became the largest piece of continental crust of the Paleozoic Era, covering an area of some 100,000,000 km2 (39,000,000 sq mi), about one-fifth of the Earth's surface. It fused with Laurasia during the Carboniferous to form Pangaea. Gondwana began to separate from northern Pangea (Laurasia) during the Triassic, and started to fragment during the Early Jurassic (around 180 million years ago). The final stages of break-up saw the fragmentation of the Antarctic land bridge (involving the separation of Antarctica from South America and Australia, forming the Drake and Tasmanian Passages), which occurred during the Paleogene (from around 66 to 23 million years ago (Ma)). Gondwana was not considered a supercontinent by the earliest definition, since the landmasses of Baltica, Laurentia, and Siberia were separated from it. To differentiate it from the Indian region of the same name (see § Name), it is also commonly called Gondwanaland. Regions that were part of Gondwana shared floral and faunal elements that persist to the present day. Name The continent of Gondwana was named by the Austrian scientist Eduard Suess after the Indian region of the same name, which is derived from Sanskrit गोण्डवन goṇḍavana ('forest of the Gonds'). The name had been previously used in a geological context, first by H. B. Medlicott in 1872, from which the Gondwana sedimentary sequences (Permian-Triassic) are also described.[citation needed] Some scientists prefer the term "Gondwanaland" for the supercontinent to make a clear distinction between the region and the supercontinent. Formation The assembly of Gondwana was a protracted process during the Neoproterozoic and Paleozoic, which remains incompletely understood because of the lack of paleo-magnetic data. Several orogenies, collectively known as the Pan-African orogeny, caused the continental fragments of a much older supercontinent, Rodinia, to amalgamate. One of those orogenic belts, the Mozambique Belt, formed 800 to 650 Ma and was originally interpreted as the suture between East (India, Madagascar, Antarctica, Australia) and West Gondwana (Africa and South America). Three orogenies were recognised during the 1990s as a result of data sets compiled on behalf of oil and mining companies: the East African Orogeny (650 to 800 Ma) and Kuunga orogeny (including the Malagasy orogeny in southern Madagascar) (550 Ma), the collision between East Gondwana and East Africa in two steps, and the Brasiliano orogeny (660 to 530 Ma), the successive collision between South American and African cratons. The last stages of Gondwanan assembly overlapped with the opening of the Iapetus Ocean between Laurentia and western Gondwana. During this interval, the Cambrian explosion occurred. Laurentia was docked against the western shores of a united Gondwana for a brief period near the Precambrian and Cambrian boundary, forming the short-lived and still disputed supercontinent Pannotia. The Mozambique Ocean separated the Congo–Tanzania–Bangweulu Block of central Africa from Neoproterozoic India (India, the Antongil Block in far eastern Madagascar, the Seychelles, and the Napier and Rayner Complexes in East Antarctica). The Azania continent (much of central Madagascar, the Horn of Africa and parts of Yemen and Arabia) was an island in the Mozambique Ocean. The continents of Australia and East Antarctica were still separated from India, eastern Africa, and Kalahari by c. 600 Ma, when most of western Gondwana had already been amalgamated. By c. 550 Ma, India had reached its Gondwanan position, which initiated the Kuunga orogeny (also known as the Pinjarra orogeny). Meanwhile, on the other side of the newly forming Africa, Kalahari collided with Congo and Rio de la Plata which closed the Adamastor Ocean. c. 540–530 Ma, the closure of the Mozambique Ocean brought India next to Australia–East Antarctica, and both North China and South China were in proximity to Australia. As the rest of Gondwana formed, a complex series of orogenic events assembled the eastern parts of Gondwana (eastern Africa, Arabian-Nubian Shield, Seychelles, Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka, East Antarctica, Australia) c. 750 to 530 Ma. First, the Arabian-Nubian Shield collided with eastern Africa (in the Kenya-Tanzania region) in the East African Orogeny c.750 to 620 Ma. Then Australia and East Antarctica were merged with the remaining Gondwana c. 570 to 530 Ma in the Kuunga Orogeny. The later Malagasy orogeny at about 550–515 Mya affected Madagascar, eastern East Africa and southern India. In it, Neoproterozoic India collided with the already combined Azania and Congo–Tanzania–Bangweulu Block, suturing along the Mozambique Belt. The 18,000 km-long (11,000 mi) Terra Australis Orogen developed along Gondwana's western, southern, and eastern margins. Proto-Gondwanan Cambrian arc belts from this margin have been found in eastern Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and Antarctica. Though these belts formed a continuous arc chain, the direction of subduction was different between the Australian-Tasmanian and New Zealand-Antarctica arc segments. Peri-Gondwana development: Paleozoic rifts and accretions Many terranes were accreted to Eurasia during Gondwana's existence, but the Cambrian or Precambrian origin of many of these terranes remains uncertain. For example, some Paleozoic terranes and microcontinents that now make up Central Asia, often called the "Kazakh" and "Mongolian terranes", were progressively amalgamated into the continent Kazakhstania in the late Silurian. Whether these blocks originated on the shores of Gondwana is not known. In the Early Paleozoic, the Armorican terrane, which today form large parts of France, was part of Peri-Gondwana; the Rheic Ocean closed in front of it and the Paleo-Tethys Ocean opened behind it. Precambrian rocks from the Iberian Peninsula suggest that it, too, formed part of core Gondwana before its detachment as an orocline in the Variscan orogeny close to the Carboniferous–Permian boundary. South-east Asia was made of Gondwanan and Cathaysian continental fragments that were assembled during the Mid-Paleozoic and Cenozoic. This process can be divided into three phases of rifting along Gondwana's northern margin: first, in the Devonian, North and South China, together with Tarim and Quidam (north-western China) rifted, opening the Paleo-Tethys behind them. These terranes accreted to Asia during Late Devonian and Permian. Second, in the Late Carboniferous to Early Permian, Cimmerian terranes opened Meso-Tethys Ocean; Sibumasu and Qiangtang were added to south-east Asia during Late Permian and Early Jurassic. Third, in the Late Triassic to Late Jurassic, Lhasa, Burma, Woyla terranes opened the Neo-Tethys Ocean; Lhasa collided with Asia during the Early Cretaceous, and Burma and Woyla during the Late Cretaceous. Gondwana's long, northern margin remained a mostly passive margin throughout the Paleozoic. The Early Permian opening of the Neo-Tethys Ocean along this margin produced a long series of terranes, many of which were and still are being deformed in the Himalayan orogeny. These terranes are, from Turkey to north-eastern India: the Taurides in southern Turkey; the Lesser Caucasus Terrane in Georgia; the Sanand, Alborz, and Lut terranes in Iran; the Mangysglak Terrane in the Caspian Sea; the Afghan Terrane; the Karakorum Terrane in northern Pakistan; and the Lhasa and Qiangtang terranes in Tibet. The Permian–Triassic widening of the Neo-Tethys pushed all these terranes across the Equator and over to Eurasia. During the Neoproterozoic to Paleozoic phase of the Terra Australis Orogen, a series of terranes were rafted from the proto-Andean margin when the Iapetus Ocean opened, to be added back to Gondwana during the closure of that ocean. During the Paleozoic, some blocks which helped to form parts of the Southern Cone of South America, include a piece transferred from Laurentia when the west edge of Gondwana scraped against southeast Laurentia in the Ordovician. This is the Cuyania or Precordillera terrane of the Famatinian orogeny in northwest Argentina which may have continued the line of the Appalachians southwards. Chilenia terrane accreted later against Cuyania. The collision of the Patagonian terrane with the southwestern Gondwanan occurred in the late Paleozoic. Subduction-related igneous rocks from beneath the North Patagonian Massif have been dated at 320–330 million years old, indicating that the subduction process initiated in the early Carboniferous. This was relatively short-lived (lasting about 20 million years), and initial contact of the two landmasses occurred in the mid-Carboniferous, with broader collision during the early Permian. In the Devonian, an island arc named Chaitenia accreted to Patagonia in what is now south-central Chile. Gondwana as part of Pangaea: Late Paleozoic to Early Mesozoic Gondwana and Laurasia formed the Pangaea supercontinent during the Carboniferous. Pangaea began to break up in the Mid-Jurassic when the Central Atlantic opened. In the western end of Pangaea, the collision between Gondwana and Laurasia closed the Rheic and Paleo-Tethys oceans. The obliquity of this closure resulted in the docking of some northern terranes in the Marathon, Ouachita, Alleghanian, and Variscan orogenies, respectively. Southern terranes, such as Chortis and Oaxaca, on the other hand, remained largely unaffected by the collision along the southern shores of Laurentia. Some Peri-Gondwanan terranes, such as Yucatán and Florida, were buffered from collisions by major promontories. Other terranes, such as Carolina and Meguma, were directly involved in the collision. The final collision resulted in the Variscan-Appalachian Mountains, stretching from present-day Mexico to southern Europe. Meanwhile, Baltica collided with Siberia and Kazakhstania which resulted in the Uralian orogeny and Laurasia. Pangaea was finally amalgamated in the Late Carboniferous-Early Permian, but the oblique forces continued until Pangaea began to rift in the Triassic. In the eastern end, collisions occurred slightly later. The North China, South China, and Indochina blocks rifted from Gondwana during the middle Paleozoic and opened the Proto-Tethys Ocean. North China docked with Mongolia and Siberia during the Carboniferous–Permian, followed by South China. The Cimmerian blocks then rifted from Gondwana to form the Paleo-Tethys and Neo-Tethys oceans in the Late Carboniferous, and docked with Asia during the Triassic and Jurassic. Western Pangaea began to rift while the eastern end was still being assembled. The formation of Pangaea and its mountains had a tremendous impact on global climate and sea levels, which resulted in glaciations and continent-wide sedimentation. In North America, the base of the Absaroka sequence coincides with the Alleghanian and Ouachita orogenies and are indicative of a large-scale change in the mode of deposition far away from the Pangaean orogenies. Ultimately, these changes contributed to the Permian–Triassic extinction event and left large deposits of hydrocarbons, coal, evaporite, and metals. The breakup of Pangaea began with the Central Atlantic magmatic province (CAMP) between South America, Africa, North America, and Europe. CAMP covered more than seven million square kilometres over a few million years, reached its peak at c. 200 Ma, and coincided with the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event. The reformed Gondwanan continent was not precisely the same as that which had existed before Pangaea formed; for example, most of Florida and southern Georgia and Alabama is underlain by rocks that were originally part of Gondwana, but this region stayed attached to North America when the Central Atlantic opened. Break-up Antarctica, the centre of the supercontinent, shared boundaries with all other Gondwana continents and the fragmentation of Gondwana propagated clockwise around it. The break-up was the result of the eruption of the Karoo-Ferrar igneous province, one of the Earth's most extensive large igneous provinces (LIP) c. 200 to 170 Ma, but the oldest magnetic anomalies between South America, Africa, and Antarctica are found in what is now the southern Weddell Sea where initial break-up occurred during the Jurassic c. 180 to 160 Ma. Gondwana began to break up in the early Jurassic following the extensive and fast emplacement of the Karoo-Ferrar flood basalts c. 184 Ma. Before the Karoo plume initiated rifting between Africa and Antarctica, it separated a series of smaller continental blocks from Gondwana's southern, Proto-Pacific margin (along what is now the Transantarctic Mountains): the Antarctic Peninsula, Marie Byrd Land, Zealandia, and Thurston Island; the Falkland Islands and Ellsworth–Whitmore Mountains (in Antarctica) were rotated 90° in opposite directions; and South America south of the Gastre Fault (often referred to as Patagonia) was pushed westward. The history of the Africa-Antarctica break-up can be studied in great detail in the fracture zones and magnetic anomalies flanking the Southwest Indian Ridge. The Madagascar block and the Mascarene Plateau, stretching from the Seychelles to Réunion, were broken off India, causing Madagascar and Insular India to be separate landmasses: elements of this break-up nearly coincide with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The India–Madagascar–Seychelles separations appear to coincide with the eruption of the Deccan basalts, whose eruption site may survive as the Réunion hotspot. The Seychelles and the Maldives are now separated by the Central Indian Ridge.[citation needed] During the initial break-up in the Early Jurassic, a marine transgression swept over the Horn of Africa covering Triassic planation surfaces with sandstone, limestone, shale, marls and evaporites. East Gondwana, comprising Antarctica, Madagascar, India, and Australia, began to separate from Africa. East Gondwana then began to break up c. 132.5 to 96 Ma when India moved northwest from Australia-Antarctica. The Indian plate and the Australian plate are now separated by the Capricorn plate and its diffuse boundaries. During the opening of the Indian Ocean, the Kerguelen hotspot first formed the Kerguelen Plateau on the Antarctic plate c. 118 to 95 Ma and then the Ninety East Ridge on the Indian plate at c. 100 Ma. The Kerguelen Plateau and the Broken Ridge, the southern end of the Ninety East Ridge, are now separated by the Southeast Indian Ridge. Separation between Australia and East Antarctica began c. 132 Ma with seafloor spreading occurring c. 96 Ma. A shallow seaway developed over the South Tasman Rise during the Early Cenozoic and as oceanic crust started to separate the continents during the Eocene c. 35.5 Ma global ocean temperature dropped significantly. A dramatic shift from arc- to rift magmatism c. 100 Ma separated Zealandia, including New Zealand, the Campbell Plateau, Chatham Rise, Lord Howe Rise, Norfolk Ridge, and New Caledonia, from West Antarctica c. 84 Ma. The opening of the South Atlantic Ocean divided West Gondwana (South America and Africa), but there is considerable debate over the exact timing of this break-up. Rifting propagated from south to north along Triassic–Early Jurassic lineaments, but intra-continental rifts also began to develop within both continents in Jurassic–Cretaceous sedimentary basins, subdividing each continent into three sub-plates. Rifting began c. 190 Ma at Falkland latitudes, forcing Patagonia to move relative to the still static remainder of South America and Africa, and this westward movement lasted until the Early Cretaceous 126.7 Ma. From there rifting propagated northward during the Late Jurassic c. 150 Ma or Early Cretaceous c. 140 Ma most likely forcing dextral movements between sub-plates on either side. South of the Walvis Ridge and Rio Grande Rise the Paraná and Etendeka magmatics resulted in further ocean-floor spreading c. 130 to 135 Ma and the development of rifts systems on both continents, including the Central African Rift System and the Central African Shear Zone which lasted until c. 85 Ma. At Brazilian latitudes spreading is more difficult to assess because of the lack of palaeo-magnetic data, but rifting occurred in Nigeria at the Benue Trough c. 118 Ma. North of the Equator the rifting began after 120.4 Ma and continued until c. 100 to 96 Ma. Dinosaur footprints representing identical species assemblages are known from opposite sides of the South Atlantic (Brazil and Cameroon) dating to around 120 million years ago, suggesting that some form of land connection still existed between Africa and South America as recently as the early Aptian. The first phases of Andean orogeny in the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous were characterised by extensional tectonics, rifting, the development of back-arc basins and the emplacement of large batholiths. This development is presumed to have been linked to the subduction of cold oceanic lithosphere. During the mid to Late Cretaceous (c. 90 million years ago), the Andean orogeny changed significantly in character. Warmer and younger oceanic lithosphere is believed to have started to be subducted beneath South America around this time. Such kind of subduction is held responsible not only for the intense contractional deformation that different lithologies were subject to, but also the uplift and erosion known to have occurred from the Late Cretaceous onward. Plate tectonic reorganisation since the mid-Cretaceous might also have been linked to the opening of the South Atlantic Ocean. Another change related to mid-Cretaceous plate tectonic rearrangement was the change of subduction direction of the oceanic lithosphere that went from having south-east motion to having a north-east motion about 90 million years ago. While subduction direction changed, it remained oblique (and not perpendicular) to the coast of South America, and the direction change affected several subduction zone-parallel faults including Atacama, Domeyko and Liquiñe-Ofqui. Insular India began to collide with Asia circa 70 Ma, forming the Indian subcontinent, since which more than 1,400 km (870 mi) of crust has been absorbed by the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen. During the Cenozoic, the orogen resulted in the construction of the Tibetan Plateau between the Tethyan Himalayas in the south and the Kunlun and Qilian mountains in the north. Later, South America was connected to North America via the Isthmus of Panama, cutting off a circulation of warm water and thereby making the Arctic colder, as well as allowing the Great American Interchange. The break-up of Gondwana can be said to continue in eastern Africa at the Afar triple junction, which separates the Arabian, African, and Somali plates, resulting in rifting in the Red Sea and East African Rift. In the Early Cenozoic, Australia was still connected to Antarctica c. 35–40° south of its current location and both continents were largely unglaciated. This was one end of the Antarctic land bridge, the other connecting Antarctica to South America. A rift between the two developed but remained an embayment until the Eocene-Oligocene boundary when the Circumpolar Current developed and the glaciation of Antarctica began. Australia was warm and wet during the Paleocene and dominated by rainforests. The opening of the Tasman Gateway at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary (33 Ma) resulted in abrupt cooling but the Oligocene became a period of high rainfall with swamps in southeastern Australia. During the Miocene, a warm and humid climate developed with pockets of rainforests in central Australia, but before the end of the period, colder and drier climate severely reduced this rainforest. A brief period of increased rainfall in the Pliocene was followed by drier climate which favoured grassland. Since then, the fluctuation between wet interglacial periods and dry glacial periods has developed into the present arid regime. Australia has thus experienced various climate changes over a 15-million-year period with a gradual decrease in precipitation. The Tasman Gateway between Australia and Antarctica began to open c. 40 to 30 Ma. Palaeontological evidence indicates the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) was established in the Late Oligocene c. 23 Ma with the full opening of the Drake Passage and the deepening of the Tasman Gateway. The oldest oceanic crust in the Drake Passage, however, is 34 to 29 Ma-old which indicates that the spreading between the Antarctic and South American plates began near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. Deep sea environments in Tierra del Fuego and the North Scotia Ridge during the Eocene and Oligocene indicate a "Proto-ACC" opened during this period. Later, 26 to 14 Ma, a series of events severally restricted the Proto-ACC: change to shallow marine conditions along the North Scotia Ridge; closure of the Fuegan Seaway, the deep sea that existed in Tierra del Fuego; and uplift of the Patagonian Cordillera. This, together with the reactivated Iceland plume, contributed to global warming. During the Miocene, the Drake Passage began to widen, and as water flow between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula increased, the renewed ACC resulted in cooler global climate. Since the Eocene, the northward movement of the Australian Plate has resulted in an arc-continent collision with the Philippine and Caroline plates and the uplift of the New Guinea Highlands. From the Oligocene to the late Miocene, the climate in Australia, dominated by warm and humid rainforests before this collision, began to alternate between open forest and rainforest before the continent became the arid or semiarid landscape it is today. Biogeography The adjective "Gondwanan" is in common use in biogeography when referring to patterns of distribution of living organisms, typically when the organisms are restricted to two or more of the now-discontinuous regions that were once part of Gondwana, including the Antarctic flora. For example, the plant family Proteaceae, known from all continents in the Southern Hemisphere, has a "Gondwanan distribution" and is often described as an archaic, or relict, lineage. The distributions in the Proteaceae is, nevertheless, the result of both Gondwanan rafting and later oceanic dispersal. During the Silurian, Gondwana extended from the Equator (Australia) to the South Pole (North Africa and South America) whilst Laurasia was located on the Equator opposite to Australia. A short-lived Late Ordovician glaciation was followed by a Silurian Hot House period. The End-Ordovician extinction, which resulted in 27% of marine invertebrate families and 57% of genera going extinct, occurred during this shift from Ice House to Hot House. By the end of the Ordovician, Cooksonia, a slender, ground-covering plant, became the first known vascular plant to establish itself on land. This first colonisation occurred exclusively around the Equator on landmasses then limited to Laurasia and, in Gondwana, to Australia. In the late Silurian, two distinctive lineages, zosterophylls and rhyniophytes, had colonised the tropics. The former evolved into the lycopods that were to dominate the Gondwanan vegetation over a long period, whilst the latter evolved into horsetails and gymnosperms. Most of Gondwana was located far from the Equator during this period and remained a lifeless and barren landscape. West Gondwana drifted north during the Devonian, bringing Gondwana and Laurasia close together. Global cooling contributed to the Late Devonian extinction (19% of marine families and 50% of genera went extinct) and glaciation occurred in South America. Before Pangaea had formed, terrestrial plants, such as pteridophytes, began to diversify rapidly resulting in the colonisation of Gondwana. The Baragwanathia Flora, found only in the Yea Beds of Victoria, Australia, occurs in two strata separated by 1,700 m (5,600 ft) or 30 Ma; the upper assemblage is more diverse and includes Baragwanathia, the first primitive herbaceous lycopod to evolve from the zosterophylls. During the Devonian, giant club mosses replaced the Baragwanathia Flora, introducing the first trees, and by the Late Devonian this first forest was accompanied by the progymnosperms, including the first large trees Archaeopteris. The Late Devonian extinction probably also resulted in osteolepiform fishes evolving into the amphibian tetrapods, the earliest land vertebrates, in Greenland and Russia. The only traces of this evolution in Gondwana are amphibian footprints and a single jaw from Australia. The closure of the Rheic Ocean and the formation of Pangaea in the Carboniferous resulted in the rerouting of ocean currents that initiated an Ice House period. As Gondwana began to rotate clockwise, Australia shifted south to more temperate latitudes. An ice cap initially covered most of southern Africa and South America but spread to eventually cover most of the supercontinent, except northernmost Africa-South America. Giant lycopod and horsetail forests continued to evolve in tropical Laurasia together with a diversified assemblage of true insects. In Gondwana, in contrast, ice and, in Australia, volcanism decimated the Devonian flora to a low-diversity seed fern flora – the pteridophytes were increasingly replaced by the gymnosperms which were to dominate until the Mid-Cretaceous. Australia, however, was still located near the Equator during the Early Carboniferous, and during this period, temnospondyl and lepospondyl amphibians and the first amniote reptilians evolved, all closely related to the Laurasian fauna, but spreading ice eventually drove these animals away from Gondwana entirely. The Gondwana ice sheet melted, and sea levels dropped during the Permian and Triassic global warming. During this period, the extinct glossopterids colonised Gondwana and reached peak diversity in the Late Permian when coal-forming forests covered all of Gondwana. The period also saw the evolution of Voltziales, one of the few plant orders to survive the Permian–Triassic extinction (57% of marine families and 83% of genera went extinct) and which came to dominate in the Late Permian and from whom true conifers evolved. Tall lycopods and horsetails dominated the wetlands of Gondwana in the Early Permian. Insects co-evolved with glossopterids across Gondwana and diversified with more than 200 species in 21 orders by the Late Permian, many known from South Africa and Australia. Beetles and cockroaches remained minor elements in this fauna. Tetrapod fossils from the Early Permian have only been found in Laurasia but they became common in Gondwana later during the Permian. The arrival of the therapsids resulted in the first plant-vertebrate-insect ecosystem. During the Mid- to Late Triassic, hot-house conditions coincided with a peak in biodiversity – the end-Permian extinction was enormous and so was the radiation that followed. Two families of conifers, Podocarpaceae and Araucariaceae, dominated Gondwana in the Early Triassic, but Dicroidium, an extinct genus of fork-leaved seed ferns, dominated woodlands and forests of Gondwana during most of the Triassic. Conifers evolved and radiated during the period, with six of eight extant families already present before the end of it. Bennettitales and Pentoxylales, two now extinct orders of gymnospermous plants, evolved in the Late Triassic and became important in the Jurassic and Cretaceous. It is possible that gymnosperm biodiversity surpassed later angiosperm biodiversity and that the evolution of angiosperms began during the Triassic but, if so, in Laurasia rather than in Gondwana. Two Gondwanan classes, lycophytes and sphenophytes, saw a gradual decline during the Triassic while ferns, though never dominant, managed to diversify. The brief period of icehouse conditions during the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event had a dramatic impact on dinosaurs but left plants largely unaffected. The Jurassic was mostly one of hot-house conditions and, while vertebrates managed to diversify in this environment, plants have left little evidence of such development, apart from Cheiroleidiacean conifers and Caytoniales and other groups of seed ferns. In terms of biomass, the Jurassic flora was dominated by conifer families and other gymnosperms that had evolved during the Triassic. The Pteridophytes that had dominated during the Paleozoic were now marginalised, except for ferns. In contrast to Laurentia, very few insect fossils have been found in Gondwana, to a considerable extent because of widespread deserts and volcanism. While plants had a cosmopolitan distribution, dinosaurs evolved and diversified in a pattern that reflects the Jurassic break-up of Pangaea. The Cretaceous saw the arrival of the angiosperms, or flowering plants, a group that probably evolved in western Gondwana (South America–Africa). From there the angiosperms diversified in two stages: the monocots and magnoliids evolved in the Early Cretaceous, followed by the hammamelid dicots. By the Mid-Cretaceous, angiosperms constituted half of the flora in northeastern Australia. There is, however, no obvious connection between this spectacular angiosperm radiation and any known extinction event nor with vertebrate/insect evolution. Insect orders associated with pollination, such as beetles, flies, butterflies and moths, wasps, bees, ants, radiated continuously from the Permian-Triassic, long before the arrival of the angiosperms. Well-preserved insect fossils have been found in the lake deposits of the Santana Formation in Brazil, the Koonwarra Lake fauna in Australia, and the Orapa diamond mine in Botswana. Dinosaurs continued to prosper but, as the angiosperm diversified, conifers, bennettitaleans and pentoxylaleans disappeared from Gondwana c. 115 Ma together with the specialised herbivorous ornithischians, whilst generalist browsers, such as several families of sauropodomorph Saurischia, prevailed. The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event killed off all dinosaurs except birds, but plant evolution in Gondwana was hardly affected. Gondwanatheria is an extinct group of non-therian mammals with a Gondwanan distribution (South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Zealandia and Antarctica) during the Late Cretaceous and Palaeogene. Xenarthra and Afrotheria, two placental clades, are of Gondwanan origin and probably began to evolve separately c. 105 Ma when Africa and South America separated. The laurel forests of Australia, New Caledonia, and New Zealand have a number of species related to those of the laurissilva of Valdivia, through the connection of the Antarctic flora. These include gymnosperms and the deciduous species of Nothofagus, as well as the New Zealand laurel, Corynocarpus laevigatus, and Laurelia novae-zelandiae. New Caledonia and New Zealand became separated from Australia by continental drift 85 million years ago. The islands still retain plants that originated in Gondwana and spread to the Southern Hemisphere continents later. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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Contents Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's largest and most inclusive collections of art made in the United States from the colonial period to the present. More than 7,000 artists are represented in the museum's collection. Most exhibitions are held in the museum's main building, the Old Patent Office Building (which is shared with the National Portrait Gallery), while craft-focused exhibitions are shown in the Renwick Gallery. The museum provides electronic resources to schools and the public through its national education program. It maintains seven online research databases with more than 500,000 records, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture that document more than 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide. Since 1951, the museum has maintained a traveling exhibition program; as of 2013, more than 2.5 million visitors have seen the exhibitions. Attendance In 2022 the museum received 1,100,000 visitors, ranking it seventh in the List of most-visited museums in the United States. History The museum's history can be traced to the creation of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. The act of Congress establishing the Smithsonian called for it to include "a gallery of art". In its early years, however, little effort was put into developing the art collection, as Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry preferred to focus on scientific research. The collection was first on display in the original Smithsonian Building (now known as the Castle). In 1865, a fire destroyed much of the collection. Those art holdings that survived were mostly loaned to the Library of Congress and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in the following decades. In 1896, the artworks were brought back to the Smithsonian, after Congress appropriated money to construct a fireproof room for them. The Smithsonian began to refer to its art collection as the National Gallery of Art in 1906, in connection with efforts to receive Harriet Lane Johnston's art collection, which she had bequeathed to the "national art gallery". The collection grew as the Smithsonian buildings grew, and the collection was housed in one or more Smithsonian buildings on the National Mall. In 1920, the National Gallery of Art was separated from the National Museum, becoming its own branch of the Smithsonian, with William Henry Holmes as its first director. By this time, space had become critical: "Collections to the value of several millions of dollars are in storage or temporarily on exhibition and are crowding out important exhibits and producing a congested condition in the Natural History, Industrial Arts, and Smithsonian Buildings". In 1924, architect Charles A. Platt drew up preliminary plans for a National Gallery of Art to be built on the block next to the Natural History Museum. However, this building was never constructed. In 1937, the National Gallery of Art became the National Collection of Fine Arts (NCFA), because Andrew Mellon insisted that the previous moniker be given to a new institution formed through his donation of a large art collection. By the 1950s, the NCFA still occupied a small space in the Natural History Building. In 1958, Congress finally granted the NCFA a home, the Old Patent Office Building, which was about to be vacated by the U.S. Civil Service Commission. The building would be shared with the planned National Portrait Gallery, with the NCFA occupying the northern half of the building. Renovation work on the building began in 1964. The NCFA opened in its new home on May 6, 1968. The museum's relocation came at an unfortunate time, as the neighborhood had been devastated a month earlier by the Martin Luther King assassination riots. The NCFA struggled to attract visitors over the following decades, as the streets around it remained bleak and lonely. This would remain a factor until the late 1990s, when the work of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation and the opening of the MCI Center (now Capital One Arena) across the street from the museum sparked a revitalization of the neighborhood. The NCFA gained a new branch in 1972, opening the Renwick Gallery, dedicated to design and crafts, in a historic building near the White House. In 1980, the name was changed to the National Museum of American Art, to better distinguish it from other federal art museums and to emphasize its focus on American artists. From 1982 to 1988, Charles C. Eldredge served as the museum director, followed by the tenures of Elizabeth Broun and Stephanie Stebich. In January 2000, the museum closed to begin a planned three-year, $60-million renovation of the Patent Office Building. To keep the museum's collection accessible to the public during the closure, many of the artworks were sent out in a "Treasures to Go" series of traveling exhibitions, billed as "the largest museum tour in history". The museum's name was changed to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in October 2000 so that the museum and its traveling exhibitions could benefit from the Smithsonian's brand recognition. After renovations were underway, the plans were broadened in an effort to restore much of the building's original elegance. Many of the building's exceptional architectural features were restored: porticos modeled after the Parthenon in Athens, a curving double staircase, colonnades, vaulted galleries, large windows, and skylights as long as a city block. New features added to the building included the Lunder Conservation Center, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium, and the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard. Meanwhile, the museum's offices, library, and storage were moved to the nearby Victor Building, freeing up valuable space and allowing the museum to display four times as many artworks as before. The renovation ultimately took six years and $283 million. The museum and the National Portrait Gallery reopened their combined building, renamed as the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, on July 1, 2006. Affiliated museums The Smithsonian American Art Museum shares the historic Old Patent Office building with the National Portrait Gallery, another Smithsonian museum. Although the two museums' names have not changed, they are collectively known as the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. Also under the auspices of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Renwick Gallery is a smaller, historic building on Pennsylvania Avenue across the street from the White House. The building originally housed the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In addition to displaying a large collection of American contemporary craft, several hundred paintings from the museum's permanent collection — hung salon style: one-atop-another and side-by-side — are featured in special installations in the Grand Salon. Features and programs Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art, with more than 7,000 artists represented, that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States. SAAM contains the world's largest collection of New Deal art; a collection of contemporary craft, American impressionist paintings, and masterpieces from the Gilded Age; photography, modern folk art, works by African American and Latino artists, images of western expansion, and realist art from the first half of the twentieth century. Among the significant artists represented in its collection are Nam June Paik, Jenny Holzer, David Hockney, Richard Hunt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ching Ho Cheng, John Singer Sargent, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Albert Bierstadt, Frances Farrand Dodge, Edmonia Lewis, Thomas Moran, James Gill, Edward Hopper, John William "Uncle Jack" Dey, Karen LaMonte and Winslow Homer. SAAM describes itself as being "dedicated to collecting, understanding, and enjoying American art. The museum celebrates the extraordinary creativity of artists whose works reflect the American experience and global connections." The American Art's main building contains expanded permanent-collection galleries and public spaces. The museum has two innovative public spaces. The Luce Foundation Center for American Art is a visible art storage and study center, which allows visitors to browse more than 3,300 works of the collection. The Lunder Conservation Center is "the first art conservation facility to allow the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of the preservation work of museums". The Luce Foundation Center, which opened in July 2000, is the first visible art storage and study center in Washington, D.C., and the fourth center to bear the Luce Family name. It has 20,400 square feet on the third and fourth floors of American Art Museum. It presents more than 3,300 objects in 64 secure glass cases, which quadruples the number of artworks from the permanent collection on public view. The purpose of open storage is to allow patrons to view various niche art that is usually not part of a main exhibition or gala special. The Luce Foundation Center features paintings densely hung on screens; sculptures; crafts and objects by folk and self-taught artists arranged on shelves. Large-scale sculptures are installed on the first floor. The center has John Gellatly's European collection of decorative arts. The Lunder Conservation Center, which opened in July 2006, is the first art conservation facility that allows the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of preservation work. Conservation staff are visible to the public through floor-to-ceiling glass walls that allow visitors to see firsthand all the techniques which conservators use to examine, treat, and preserve artworks. The Lunder Center has five conservation laboratories and studios equipped to treat paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, folk art objects, contemporary crafts, decorative arts, and frames. The Center uses various specialized and esoteric tools, such as hygrothermographs, to maintain optimal temperature and humidity to preserve works of art. Staff from both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery work in the Lunder Center. The museum has put on hundreds of exhibitions since its founding. Many exhibitions are groundbreaking and promote new scholarship within the field of American art. What follows is a brief list of selected, and more recent, examples: The museum has maintained a traveling exhibition program since 1951. During the 2000s renovation, a "series of exhibitions of more than 1,000 major artworks from American Art's permanent collection traveled to 105 venues across the United States," which were "seen by more than 2.5 million visitors". Since 2006, thirteen exhibitions have toured to more than 30 cities. SAAM provides electronic resources to schools and the public as part of education programs. An example is Artful Connections, which gives real-time video conference tours of American Art. In addition, the museum offers the Summer Institutes: Teaching the Humanities through Art, week-long professional development workshops that introduce educators to methods for incorporating American art and technology into their humanities curricula. American Art has seven online research databases, which has more than 500,000 records of artworks in public and private collections worldwide, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture. Numerous researchers and millions of virtual visitors per year use these databases. Also, American Art and Heritage Preservation work together in a joint project, Save Outdoor Sculpture, "dedicated to the documentation and preservation of outdoor sculpture". The museum produces a peer-reviewed periodical, American Art (started in 1987), for new scholarship. Since 1993, American Art has been had an online presence. It has one of the earliest museum websites when, in 1995, it launched its own website. EyeLevel, the first blog at the Smithsonian Institution, was started in 2005 and, as of 2013, the blog "has approximately 12,000 readers each month". In popular culture In 2006, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi designed the conservators' denim work aprons. In 2008, the American Art Museum hosted an alternate reality game, called Ghosts of a Chance, which was created by City Mystery. The game allowed patrons "a new way of engaging with the collection" in the Luce Foundation Center. The game ran for six weeks and attracted more than 6,000 participants. See also References External links |
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