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PARANOID ANDROID | Mithun Mohandas | Managing Editor
Fine: Pa(y)tent
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same act in another. That right there, is a business decision that has been vetted by numerous departments within the company and was found to be an acceptable risk. You’ll see this happening often with privacy and information security violations. A few days ago, I was conversing with a friend who works as an Information Security Officer at a major consulting firm and was posted with a financial organisation. Turns out that it’s common practise for the IT teams at these financial organisations to skirt past the security recommendations of the audits just to meet the production deadlines. The appalling thing about such incidents is that both parties, the financial institution and the auditing company, are aware of the bug and the institution asks for a temporary leeway so that they can meet deadlines. This particular incident was regarding an app used by the institution for internal purposes. Now imagine if the same was done with a banking app used by millions of people? Companies cannot be treated like individuals. Monetary fines don’t hurt for them as they do for you and I. For companies, it simply ends up being the cost of doing business. A year down the line, it ends up being a minor blimp on their financial declarations and everybody moves on. Technology companies who violate privacy laws or technology companies in general need to be treated differently. Certainly, you can bump the fine amount, add another zero at the end of millions and turn that into a billion, and it will still not be enough to be a deterrent. They make money off their technologies and that remains untouched by fines. I’d say, you should hit them where it hurts the most, take away their patents and put them in the public domain. Patents have tremendous monetary value and are what makes a technology company valuable. The threat of losing patents should be, a great deterrent for technology companies. They’ll lose the ability to make money from those patents and putting these patents in the public domain will accelerate the next industrial revolution. A common defense against this would be the commie argument, that by putting patents in the public domain, companies will be discouraged from innovating. Nope, I’m not advocating for all patents to be stripped. So they can still make money as long as they don’t violate any laws. Let me know what you think, will it make the world a better place?
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WE’VE ALL HAD THE PAINFUL DISPLEASURE of being fined at least once in our lives. Some more than others. Most of us experience it way before our brains have developed enough to even realise that we’ve been fined. I’m pretty certain you must have had a toy of yours taken away because you bonked your sibling on the head. Not that I’ve had a violent streak in me but as creatures born into this world without an iota of knowledge as to what’s bad and what’s good, we’re shaped into understanding the rules of society by these measures. For a child, being separated from their toy is a form of punishment. For grown-ups, there are monetary fines, demotions, dismissals and the odd prison sentence should things get out of hand. Some of these punishments do act as a deterrent but there are situations wherein the punishment really doesn’t matter. Perhaps you don’t have a choice. Perhaps you lack the appropriate neurochemical response associated with being penalised as is the case with psychopathic individuals. Most of us would weigh the pros and cons of breaking a certain before going ahead with the act. It’s only logical. Take for example, if you had to shoot a hungry lion to save yourself, I don’t see any sane person who’d sacrifice themselves. The deterrent effect of punishments vary vastly from person-to-person, country-to-country and company-to-company. There have been studies wherein student participants who had to pay fines for being late did not exhibit any corrective measures towards the end of the study. Then there are cases like Singapore, wherein the fines are so hefty that you’d memorise the rule book just to be on the safer side of things. What about multinational companies? Search the phrase “fined for violating” in Google and you’re bound to come across numerous technology companies. Ironically, for me seven out of the first 10 results were about Google getting fined. Technology companies rule the roost when it comes to getting fined. It’s not because they’re evil – perhaps I shouldn’t be using definitive statements here – but because they’re charting new technological and legal territories all the time. Territories which were not clearly studied by lawmakers in the past. This feels acceptable to me, it’s part of being ahead of the game. However, I don’t share the same opinion for companies that willingly flout the law in a country despite being fined for the
“Companies cannot be treated like individuals. Monetary fines don’t hurt for them as they do for you and I. For companies, it simply ends up being the cost of doing business.”
Let me know your thoughts on this column at: @mithun_mohandas | mithun@digit.in
www.digit.in | May 2019 | Digit | 1
THE RSS FEED | Robert Sovereign-Smith | Executive Editor
Robbing yourself?
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addictive, or you see an ad on a social network for the game. You install it, just accept all the permissions it asks for, and get to playing it. It’s pretty addictive for a while, but eventually you bore of it. Doesn’t have to be a game, it could be any sort of app. Problem is, you gave it permission to run in the background, and boy, does it! It requests ads, simulates clicks, and does it all in the background. Not only is this possible, it’s been happening for some time, and new developers are caught doing this all the time. In February 2019, Oracle discovered and reported a bot that they called ‘DrainerBot’, which was a mobile ad fraud bot that was downloading and pretending to display video ads in apps that weren’t even run by users. All happening in the background, this led to not just battery drain, but also data usage in some cases of up to 10 GB a month! Read more about it here: https://dgit.in/DrainerBot Ad fraud is roughly estimated to be at least a 20 billion dollar market, with some estimates going as high as $40 billion. That’s a lot of money just waiting to be earned by developers with no morals, but of course, you’re the middle man here. None of this is possible without you and me, and it relies on us using apps from unknown (usually Chinese) developers who are a dime a dozen. Why should you care if rich advertisers are being ripped off? Because those same rich advertisers always make their money back, always! They just charge us more for their products and services, which we need or want. In the end, it’s like we’re being accomplices in the goal of picking our own pockets! All we need to do is be a lot more careful about what we install, and make sure we only do it from trusted sources. Surely that’s not a hard ask is it? While you’re at it, please also make sure to whitelist the digit.in domain in your ad blocker, and when you want to buy something, find it on our site and use our affiliate links. We really could use the support, since we don’t use any nefarious techniques such as GIVT, SIVT or any IVT for that matter...
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INSTEAD OF BEING JUST CONSUMERS, you and me are also donning the hat of unwitting accomplice in some of the biggest scams that are being perpetrated right now! I’ll get to an explanation of how that is in a minute. In 2019, when the amount of money spent on ads worldwide is estimated to be roughly 650 billion USD, for the first time ever, will over half of that be spent on digital platforms. This is according to a report by emarketer.com. An estimated $333 billion will be spent in 2019 on digital ads, and about a third of that will go to Google ($103 billion). Facebook will be a distant second at about 67 billion, Alibaba will get 29 billion, Amazon will earn 14 billion, etc. Needless to say, it’s a pie that’s growing fast, and more and more people want a part of it, especially if said piece can be gotten easily. Methods of getting you to click on rubbish have long since moved on from the good old days of email spam – never thought I’d find myself calling the email spam days ‘good’! That was replaced with what is known as GIVT. It stands for General InValid Traffic, which is essentially just robots pretending to be human and clicking links and visiting websites, and the like. Even legitimate search engine crawlers are considered GIVT, because they are useless to advertisers. Bots which spend 24 hours a day clicking hundreds of thousands of links used to be able to fool ad networks, and artificially raise money for evil web sites who wanted to inflate traffic figures and ad clicks. However, the ad industry soon used technology against itself to catch this out. Now we have what’s called SIVT – sophisticated invalid traffic. This is the traffic that often has cheap human labour behind it, or very smartly programmed bots that attempt to mimic real humans and their behaviours. Perhaps watching hours of cat videos and then liking posts of pages that paid them. Perhaps it’s as simple as actually scrolling and spending time on pages that mimics reading before clicking on an ad, and of course, being logged into fake social media accounts also helps. While GIVT is no trouble, SIVT keeps finding inventive ways in which to game the system, and one of those ways is by compromising your phone. This is where I come back to the part about you being an unwitting accomplice to fraud. You see a friend share a game that looks
2 | Digit | May 2019 | www.digit.in
“Methods of getting you to click on rubbish have long since moved on from the good old days of email spam – never thought I’d find myself calling the email spam days ‘good’!”
Liked or hated this column? Let me know at: editor@digit.in | facebook.com/raaabo | @raaabo
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contents
COVER STORY PAGE 64- 80
Process This
Learn how the latest CPUs, GPUs and Mobile SoCs work. This is how you get to know your devices inside out. TECH - PAGE 12-42
MAY 2019
26 | Top 3
From gaming mice to smartphones, here’s what we recommend for your next purchase!
27 | Killer rigs
VOLUME 19 ISSUE 05
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Everything you’ll ever need to build your own PC. Whatever your budget.
28 | DevWorx: In your genes
Genetic algorithm brings evolutionary practices to programming.
14 | What makes app work?
32 | Reviews
18 | Supercharged
40 | Teardown
20 | DIY Intercom
42 | Take my money
India is consuming apps like never before. What are newly popular apps doing right?
India’s startups are driving the electric vehicle ecosystem in all possible ways.
An old spare phone gathering dust in your drawer, might just be the push that is needed to get those creative juices flowing.
22 | A fool’s errand
Agent001 skeptical about high-resolution displays for gaming.
4 | Digit | May 2019 | www.digit.in
The latest products reviewed for you, including smartphones, graphic cards and headsets.
The Apple AirPods 2 opened up, more durable, but also harder to repair.
The Fido U2F Hardware Key, a monitor that you can mount on your gamepad, and a VR headset that simulates smell.
AND MORE
CULTURE - PAGE 43-50
ALT - PAGE 81-95
ON THE DVD 44 | Sci-Fi on Netflix
82 | Famous Equations
46 | Booman hates April
84 | Living Planets
50 | 1000 Words
88 | India’s esports potential
TECH Solus 4 Fortitude Solus is a modern operating system to power your daily needs, and is designed to accommodate a wide range of use cases.
Some planets in SciFi are not just dead chunks of rocks, but have a mind.
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Because why hate one thing when you can hate it all!
These equations are for everyone, not just mathematicians and scientists. Here is how they affect your life.
One of the factors that make an image go viral is its improbably perfect timing, which requires either luck or planning.
AND MORE
We sit down with Intel’s gaming guys to learn about their plans for the Indian esports scene.
AND MORE
SKOAR! - PAGE 96-111
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SCIENCE - PAGE 51-63
52 | Emerald Icebergs
98 | The Division 2
54 | Origins: Typefaces
100 | Mortal Kombat 11
Most icebergs are blue or white in colour, but very rarely, an iceberg is spotting with a bright emerald colouration.
The evolution of typefaces is a lesson in human history.
58 | The Kuiper Cliff
The Division 2 takes us away from the wintery New York setting and puts us in Washington DC.
Ready, Steady, Grind!
102 | Stadia
The future of gaming is not a box.
At the edge of the solar system, beyond a distance of 47.8 AU from the Sun, the number of objects suddenly drops off, and science does not have an explanation.
106 | ESL One Mumbai 2019
62 | Tractor Beams
109 | Zero2Hero
Rays grab and move objects has been a science fiction staple, which has recently been defictionalised.
AND MORE
India’s second tryst with an esports major.
This segment is dedicated to those of you who are toughing it out in the Indian gaming scene right now.
AND MORE
Starport Wolfenstein 3D: Iron Knight Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny Splatterhouse 3D: Gold Edition Mini of Duty AssaultCube Gravity Bone War Torn Lands Grepr Image 20th Zone II Innawoods World of Zombies Haste Tremulous Albums
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Netflix has a wide variety of Sci-Fi shows available to geek out on, and we have listed the ones that are fun to watch.
Keras Keras is a high-level neural networks API, written in Python and capable of running on top of TensorFlow, CNTK, or Theano. All these three backends are included on the DVD as well. Essentials 7Zip Deluge qBittorrent VLC Free Download Manager K-Lite Codec Pack FFmpeg Avidemux Handbrake Winamp Speedrunner Skype LibreOffice Easy BCD Speedfan VirtualBox Discord
CULT FPS Games Cube 2: Sauerbraten Triple333 Doom Risen3D Galaxy Guardian
Albums Build your hipster cred by listening to these albums Heifervescent Excuses For The Common Man Jekk - Strong SCI Principles of Chemistry This course provides an introduction to the chemistry of biological, inorganic, and organic molecules. ALT The Lost World The first film adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel about a land where prehistoric creatures still roam free. Sounds from Space You read that right!
www.digit.in | May 2019 | Digit | 5
TO ADVERTISE MAY 2019 • VOLUME 19 • ISSUE 05
PRODUCTS REVIEWED THIS MONTH
EMAIL: sales@digit.in SALES DIRECTOR: Rashmi Mamgain Kumar Mobile: +91-9900567780 NORTH: Mayank Sharma Mobile: +91-8800661912
EDITORIAL Executive Editor Robert Sovereign-Smith Managing Editor Mithun Mohandas Features Editor Aditya Madanapalle Associate Editor Arnab Mukherjee
EAST: Jayanta Bhattacharyya Mobile: +91-93318 29284
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SOUTH: Jayanth Ramakrishna Mobile: +91-9964087233
BAZAAR Huawei P30 Pro Samsung Galaxy S10 Samsung Galaxy M30 GALAX RTX 2080 Ti Asustor AS6204T NAS ASUS ROG Rampage VI Extreme Omega Anker Soundcore Flare RHA TrueConnect Audio-Technica ATH-M50xBT Whizzer Kylin A-HE03
WEST: Suvarna Shringarpure Mobile: +91-93249 28247 TEST CENTRE Reviews Editor Swapnil Mathur Reviewers Subhrojit Mallick, Vignesh Giridharan
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GAMES REVIEWED THIS MONTH The Division 2 Mortal Kombat 11
DIGIT.IN Editor Soham Raninga Managing Editor Adamya Sharma Assistant Editor Sameer Mitha Senior Sub-Editor Shrey Pacheco Writer Shubham Sharma
ADVERTISING INDEX
Brand.......................................... Page No.
Samsung.................................Inside front cover
Corsair.....................................Inside back cover
TP Link..............................................Back cover
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DESIGN Sr. Art Director Anil VK Art Director Shokeen Saifi Visualiser Baiju NV Lead UI/UX Designer Shri Hari Tiwari
Accenture.........................................................3
PRODUCTION AND LOGISTICS Manager Operations Rakesh Upadhyay Manager Logistics Mahendra Kumar Singh Executive Mohd. Nadeem Ansari
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6 | Digit | May 2019 | www.digit.in
Published and printed by Kanak Ghosh for and on behalf of the owners, 9.9 Group Pvt. Ltd. (Formerly known as Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Private Limited) 121, Patparganj, Mayur Vihar Phase-1, Near Mandir Masjid, Delhi - 110091 and printed at International Print-O-Pac Limited, C/4-11, Hosiery Complex, Phase II Extension, Noida-201306 (U.P.) INDIA. Editor: Kanak Ghosh.
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READER SERVICES Team Leader Sudhir Patel +91-22-67899678 / help@digit.in
MOBILE MONTHLY Harry Potter: Wizards Unite | OCO | Final Strike: Final Hour | Marginalia Hero | Kawaii Kitchen | Spirit Roots | Monsters with Attitude | Elder Scrolls Blades
COVER DESIGN Anil VK
DISCLAIMER For every Digit contest, there will be only one winner, unless specified otherwise. In the event of a dispute, the Editor’s decision shall be final.
CONTACT US TELL US WHAT YOU FEEL ABOUT DIGIT If you have an opinion about anything published in Digit, or about technology in general, write to editor@digit.in or call at +91-22-678 99 700. To interact with the authors of specific articles, please write to the email address specified under the author’s name HELP! For copy-related issues, delivery status or any other complaints regarding our service, write to help@digit.in or call +91-22-678 99 678
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PRODUCT TESTING Want your product reviewed by Digit? Contact our Test Center at testcenter@digit.in or call +91-22-678 99 708 NEWS & NEW PRODUCT LAUNCHES To announce new product launches and press releases, email us at pressrelease@digit.in
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http://www.facebook.com/skoar What is life without gaming? Catch up on all the latest in gaming news, reviews and shenanigans from our test labs
WHAT’S NEW
Apple and Qualcomm settle patent disputes
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sector. Intel’s 5G modem which was scheduled to launch in 2020 has been cancelled as well. Apple had been using Intel modems in some of their smartphones since the iPhone 7. However, telecom service providers could opt to sell only Qualcomm enabled iPhones as Verizon and Sprint were in the US. It is unclear if there is an exclusivity agreement. It seems like Qualcomm will grab the lion’s share of the market followed by MediaTek. https://dgit.in/AplQlcmBros
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DOES THIS SECTION EVEN NEED AN INTRODUCTION? FROM COMPUTERS TO MOBILES, AND HEADPHONES TO GPUs, IT’S ALL HERE...
pple and Qualcomm have settled their patent dispute which has been going on for about two years now. The two companies have been battling each other in courts in Germany, China, USA and many others. As part of this settlement, the companies have also formalised a six-year licensing agreement along with a multiyear chipset supply agreement. Analysts say that the need to incorporate 5G chips into their smartphones is what led to Apple coming back to the negotiation table. Immediately after this announcement, Intel announced that they were exiting the 5G mobile modem
Tesla drops NVIDIA and moves to its own AI chip for self-driving cars
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t the Tesla Autonomy Investor Day, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla will be using their in-house designed self-driving computers instead of the NVIDIA based solutions which were being used until now. Dubbed the FSD chip, Tesla claims that it is 21 times better than the NVIDIA DGX processors and is thus, “the best chip in the world …
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THIS MONTH IN TECH: A DIY intercom using old smartphones, Indian electric vehicle startups, what it takes for an app to become a hit in India and the best rig configurations money can buy.
Reliance Jio acquires 87% stake in Haptik
Reliance Jio has invested $100 Million into Haptik, a startup that develops conversational platforms i.e. voice and text chat bots. With this investment Jio has effectively bought out existing backers and has also invested 470 crores over that. https://dgit.in/JioHaptik
Google debuts end-to-end AI platform
At the Cloud Next conference, Google announced the beta launch of a platform which aims to democratise AI with pre-built models and easy to use services that form an end-toend pipeline for developers and data scientists. https://dgit.in/e2eggl
12 | Digit | May 2019 | www.digit.in
by a huge margin”. NVIDIA soon released a statement about Tesla’s claims that, “Tesla was inaccurate in comparing its Full Self Driving computer at 144
EU publishes guidelines for ethical AI
The European Union has published new guidelines on how companies and governments alike should develop ethical applications for AI. Human agency and oversight, technical robustness and privacy are some key concerns. https://dgit.in/GoodBoyAI
TOPS of processing with Nvidia Drive Xavier at 21 TOPS. The correct comparison would have been against Nvidia’s full selfdriving computer, Nvidia Drive AGX Pegasus, which delivers 320 TOPS for AI perception, localization and path planning.” Tesla’s FSD chip sits at the heart of its self-driving computer named Autopilot v3.0. https://dgit.in/TesDumpsNV
NVIDIA GTX 1650 released for budget gamers
NVIDIA has unveiled the Turing based GTX 1650, with 896 CUDA cores from INR 13,500 onwards for budget gamers. The GTX 1650 claims to provide 1.7x the performance of the GTX 1050 and comes with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. https://dgit.in/GTX1650
tech MS Paint to stay alive Microsoft has announced that the image editing software will remain on the Store. https://dgit.in/may19-34
Googlers claim retaliation Those who organised the walkout in Nov 18 have claimed retaliation from the software giant. https://dgit.in/may19-33
FEATURE
What makes
Apps work
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in India
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India is consuming apps like never before. What are newly popular apps doing right?
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Arnab Mukherjee | arnab@digit.in
sing an app to perform a task, any task for that matter, is the norm today. From simple tasks like taking a picture to complex activities like charting stars in the night sky, there’s literally an app for everything and we are using apps for all sorts of tasks. And the arrival of every new app or “technology platform” has been held up as a sign heralding the death of an older app but the ground reality has
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remained consistently different. However, not all apps that have taken off, in say the western markets, do well in India. There are certain peculiarities that are unique to each country and we came across some really interesting ones upon observing the Indian app stores. Rather than taking our word for it, have a look for yourself.
WHAT WORKS? According to the App Annie report State of Mobile 2019, apps worldwide
saw 194 billion downloads. An average user spent 3 hours on mobile apps every day, and the App Store spends grew to $101 billion - more than the GDP of Venezuela. India has seen a 165% growth in app downloads, powered by lower-end smartphones with good specs and cheaper cellular internet being easily available. Neighbouring China, while encountering slower growth rates at 70%, still accounts for nearly half the world’s downloads. However, when you look at
tech
Sony’s $70,000 98-inch 8K TV
Tesla robotaxi in 2020
Sony’s upcoming flagship TV, while cheaper than the Q900, is still pretty expensive. https://dgit.in/may19-7
AGENT001
Tesla to launch robotaxis as part of broader vision for an autonomous ride-sharing by 2020. https://dgit.in/may19-8
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A fool’s errand Agent001 remains skeptical about highresolution displays for gaming
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Agent001 | agent001@digit.in
t a recent event, I was engaged in a pretty decent conversation regarding our personal rigs with a friend of mine. We’d both recently upgraded and had both gone down different paths. I’d decided to stick with 1080p 144 Hz high frame-rate display whereas my friend had decided with a 4K 60 Hz display which he ran at 2K since he was experiencing extremely low frame rates at 4K resolution. We couldn’t give up an opportunity like this to test different games under different settings, so we started out with a few well-known titles which were optimised for low-end machines. Both of us had the same GTX 1080 Ti graphics card so there was barely any difference between both our rigs. There are a few simple facts about games and the frame rates you receive. The moment you bump up the graphics settings to max, the frame rate will drop. Increasing the resolution will cause the frame rate to drop. Games are primarily GPU bound but a lot of the current gen games are increasingly veering towards the CPU being the bottleneck. What we observed was pretty much what we had been seeing for the past few years. Higher resolutions are simply not optimal for heavy applications such as gaming.
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ers for quite some time now but even game developers would rather spend more time optimising the graphics than work on scaling the game engine with respect to the CPU. We now have HEDT CPUs with 32 cores but a video game will hardly make use of all those cores. Heck, even if you drop the graphics settings, it’ll still make no difference. A game running at minimal settings on a Quad-core CPU will give just about the same frame rates as a game running on an Octa-core CPU. In most of our benchmarks, we find performance to be greater on Quad-core CPUs than any other configuration. CPU cores are capable of running a myriad variation of calculations Higher resolutions aren’t always a good thing compared to GPU cores, which is why it is easier to squeeze in more of the dumber eration of graphics cards add more GPU cores in the same physical area streaming multiprocessors and the compared to CPU cores. Think of the performance scales remarkably well, CPU cores as a massive maze and the even for older games. GPU cores as a much simpler maze. However, if you take a look at the Because the calculations pertaining CPU, then it has remained in the same to one video frame have to spend a state for the last decade or so. Video lot more time navigating a CPU core, game engines are optimised to make the number of frames it can process the most of 4 cores and whatever more in one second is limited. This is why, you throw at it gives you no worthif you take a modern video game while returns. CPU manufacturers and completely reduce the graphics have been working with game developIf you take your graphics card, the first thing you need to work out is whether it can crunch all the frames quickly. Game developers often look at 60 FPS as the optimal frame-rate to maintain to ensure a good experience. Maintaining 60 FPS at higher resolutions isn’t easy but you can make do at 1080p. Every new gen-
22 | Digit | May 2019 | www.digit.in
> code / creativity / community >
FOR THOSE GEEKS WHO LIKE TO GET THEIR HANDS DIRTY IN CODE
In your genes as well be a numerical value). Thereafter comes the crossover stage where they are then made to reproduce which leads to offspring which have qualities inherited from their parent. To give them variety, we allow them to mutate where a single individual characteristic may be altered by a bit. This procedure is carried on in a loop until the stopping criteria has been satisfied. In this case, the stopping criterion is reached if the number of invaders reaches its maximum. Let’s understand the code bit by bit now The lowest level of the code, evolution.py is where the central genetic algorithm has been implemented which is basically our goal. However, we shall ride through the rest of the code to see how the structure of this game can be implemented in Python. We will use Python as our programming language for the generation of the code. There shall be four modules which we shall import, namely, sge, game, objects and os. The sge is a wrapper around pygame, which is one of the famous game building libraries in Python. The game object defines the essentials for the game logic. The objects stand for the players and the invaders and the os shall provide the operating system.
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Genetic algorithm brings evolutionary practices to programming
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Xavier Das | feedback@digit.in
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The process
the objective should be to keep the invaders to number as few as possible on the screen. There are a few biological terms used in this context but they are easily relatable. Each invader has 4 genes (characteristics or attributes): speed, velocity, probability of its changing direction, size. At every 5 seconds, a few invaders are chosen from their entire lot by a measure of fitness following which they mate and produce children (which are supposedly better performing than their predecessors). A flowchart of the process helps for a better visualization as shown above. We begin by initializing a population of solutions by a fitness value that is computed from a function. We select the individuals higher up in the ranks of their fitness (which may just
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ith the advent of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks a particular type of algorithm, Genetic Algorithms, have been used heavily. That is exactly what we are going to explore today and see how it can be used to build a game very similar to ‘Space Invaders’. In the field of Data Science, Genetic Algorithm is a heuristic method that emulates the Darwinian process of natural selection among a population where the fittest individuals are selected and are allowed to cross between themselves and mutate to produce better performing individuals, essentially bettering the entire population. It belongs to the superset of the evolutionary algorithms. It can also be thought of an optimization or a search technique.
ABOUT THE GAME
The invaders are going to multiply in every five second and our objective should be to keep destroying them until none exists. The invaders learn from our behavior and keep developing immunity against our attacks. The game begins with 4 invaders which is also the minimum number and can get to a maximum of 100. It can thus be inferred that we can never win the game and if the number of invaders reach a hundred, we lose. To rephrase,
28 | Digit | May 2019 | www.digit.in
THE IMPLEMENTATION We begin by setting the path to the repository of the game and then initialize the game object specific parameters like the wall height and width, the color of the screen, resolution as a background layer and set the
The player and the invaders
reviews
For better understanding of our ratings, here’s a quick guide to our overall score 10 to 30 to 50 to
51
to 70 to
71
to 90 to
Keep away!
Strictly OK.
Not recommended
Decent product.
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Extremely poor product.
to 100 91 to
Go for it, but there may be better products out there.
Very good product. Highly recommended.
Ground-breaking product.
We’ve never seen anything like it before. A definite must buy!
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The Digit Test Centre receives hundreds of products every month. Each of these products is put through a series of tests and is finally given a score. The final score is arrived at after considering a number of factors and evaluating them in terms of features, performance, value for money, build quality, and, in the case of software, ease of use.
THE LATEST PRODUCTS REVIEWED FOR YOU
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Anker Soundcore Flare
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ASUS ROG Rampage VI Extreme Omega
RHA TrueConnect
Samsung Galaxy S10
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39 ASUSTOR AS6204T NAS
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33 GALAX RTX 2080 Ti 34 Whizzer Kylin A-HE03 34 Audio-Technica ATHM50xBT 36 Samsung Galaxy M30 38 Huawei P30 Pro & MORE...
Google Stadia bad for Earth?
Intel expands portfolio
Google’s Stadia is the future of gaming, and that’s bad news for our planet. https://dgit.in/may19-15
Intel expands 9th Gen core portfolio with new desktop CPUs including Core i9-9900KF. https://dgit.in/may19-16
tech REVIEWS
GALAX RTX 2080 Ti
Like all RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards, the GALAX RTX 2080 Ti supports Real-time Ray Tracing, Ansel, G-SYNC, GPU Boost and has the latest Turing Encoder which is much more efficient than the Volta encoder that’s found in the previous gen cards. Since we’re looking at a reference card, the Core clock sits at 1350 MHz and with Boost it can hit 1545 MHz. All other specifications such as the CUDA Cores, ROPs, TMUs remain the same since this is the exact same GPU. Coming to the connectors, it has 3x DisplayPorts, 1x HDMI port and 1x USB Type-C port for VirtualLink. VirtualLink has become a standard thanks to wide support from Industry giants such as NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Valve, Oculus and HTC. Essentially, it’s future VR-ready.
5 ran at 126 FPS on FHD, 118 on 1440p and about 77 FPS on 4K. With GTA V, FHD and 1440p seem to be fairly equal pointing to a fact that the card Price 0 is a bit too powerful to use GTA V as 1,09,99 a benchmark game. In The Witcher 3, we managed to get about 177 FPS on FHD, 131 FPS on 1440p and 79 FPS on 4K.. It seems that the RTX 2080 Ti beats all previous cards in practically every single benchmark. Coming to design used by NVIDIA the power consumption, with the GTX 680 and PERFORMANCE...........90 the performance per watt GTX 780, or for that matBUILD............................75 ratio is particularly high ter, even the AMD RX VALUE FOR MONEY.....75 as well. When we compare VEGA64. In a way, this the performance-to-price is a step down from the ratio, we get the most reference cooler design expensive card that has been released that’s seen on the NVIDIA Founders for gaming. Every other GPU offers Edition cards. FE cards have a twin a greater performance-price ratio blower design and most of the front making you wonder whether the RTX as well as the back are covered with 2080 Ti is really worth it. metal which adds to the durability. In the case of the GALAX RTX 2080 Ti, it makes use of a plastic shroud on the Conclusion front and there is no backplate, plastic The GALAX RTX 2080 Ti is very or metal. These cost saving measures much a reference RTX 2080 Ti but allow GALAX to price the RTX 2080 with a slightly scaled down cooler. It Ti more aggressively. does run hotter than the FE as a result Glancing at the rear of the PCB, we but not enough to cause any throtcan say that it’s more or the same as tling. GALAX has made this particular the Founders Edition design. The newcard very competitive owing to some er FE cards were ridiculously difficult of the cost cutting measures taken. If to disassemble but that’s not the case enthusiast gamers were dissuaded with the GALAX RTX 2080 Ti. Since from getting an RTX 2080 Ti in the this is the reference card in all likelipast because of the high price, then hood, repairs should be way easier. that’s not as big a concern since they Having looked at the heatsink for the now have a much more affordable card GPU and the VRM, you’re simply left in the GALAX RTX 2080 Ti. All you with a feeling of deja vu as you’ll have now need is for more developers to seen this configuration in the past. The make use of the real-time ray tracing last aspect is that of RGB. Thankfully, features that form the cornerstone of there isn’t any of that nonsense which this new GPU. We do hope that hapmakes this all good in our books. For pens soon enough. the power, the GALAX RTX 2080 Ti –Mithun Mohandas requires two 8-PIN power connectors SPECIFICATIONS which is again, the same as the FE.
Build Quality
Performance
The GALAX RTX 2080 Ti reminds us of the old single-blower reference
We started off by running a couple of games at different resolutions. Far Cry
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ALAX had been missing from the graphics card market in India for quite some time. Their cards could sometimes be spotted on the shelves at Lamington Road but their online presence had completely trickled down. It now seems that they’re back and they’re wasting no time in making their presence felt across all ecommerce channels. The GALAX RTX 2080 Ti is the absolute basic RTX 2080 Ti from GALAX with none of the fancy lighting features or the heavy duty coolers. The RTX 2080 Ti continues to be the most expensive GPU and this SKU brings it within the reach of enthusiasts. GALAX has a pretty wide portfolio of RTX 2080 Ti GPUs. While the GALAX RTX 2080 Ti sits at one end of the spectrum, the other end has the GALAX RTX 2080 Ti HOF (Hall of Fame Edition) which is the absolute best from GALAX’s stables.
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The cheapest RTX 2080 Ti you can buy
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Features
CUDA CORES: 4352 | ROPS: 64 | CORE CLOCK: 1350 MHz | BOOST CLOCK: 1545 Mhz | MEMORY CLOCK: 14 GHz | MEMORY BUS WIDTH: 256-bit | VRAM: 11 GB | TDP: 260 W | WARRANTY: 3 Years.
CONTACT
GALAX | PHONE: NA | EMAIL: NA | WEBSITE: www.galax.com
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WHAT’S NEW
Game of Thrones Season Eight premiere breaks records
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker trailer teases old baddie
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neously as their US counterparts on Hotstar in India. The previous record for the show was the season seven finale that had 16.9 million viewers back in August 2017. At the time of writing, two episodes are already out and have seen largely positive reviews from fans. The season finale for season eight might smash all previous records for the show. https://dgit.in/GoTS8vu
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GEEK CULTURE IS OUR WAY OF LIFE, AND ENCOMPASSES MOVIES, GAMES, COMICS, AND TRENDS FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE
he highly anticipated eighth and final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones kicked off on April 14th and almost immediately smashed some records. A series record of 17.4 million people watched the season premiere. This includes 11.8 million television viewers, combined with those who streamed the show with the HBO Go or HBO Now apps as well as a couple of encore presentations. Whether this takes into account the viewership on international platforms like Hotstar is not entirely clear. Episodes for the eighth season stream simulta-
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arlier in April, Lucasfilm released the first trailer for Star Wars Episode IX, now officially titled ‘The Rise of Skywalker’. If the title wasn’t enough to generate a deluge of fan theories, the two-minutelong teaser-trailer gave eager fans a lot to process as well. There’s also a lot of additional information. For instance, this movie is the end of the ‘saga’ that comprises of the original, prequel and currently ongoing
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THIS MONTH IN CULT: This May, you’ll be out of Game of Thrones and recovering from the Endgame, so we brought you a list of awesome but underrated sci-fi shows to watch on Netflix. Booman, however, has managed to complain about the entire month of April.
Halo TV series casts Master Chief
The highly-anticipated and years-in-the-making TV adaptation of Halo has cast Pablo Schrieber in the role of Master Chief. The production is officially slated to start this fall, and we could be looking at a release that ties in with the launch of Halo Infinite. https://dgit.in/HaloMC
Detective Pikachu new trailer
The latest trailer for the upcoming Detective Pikachu movie doesn’t hold back on the cute quotient and showcases the emotional journey that the characters and the Pokémon will go through. We are looking forward to this one! https://dgit.in/PikaPika
sequel trilogy. The trailer kicks off with a sequence on a desert planet where Rey dodges a
TIE-fighter-esque ship. Kylo Ren is also shown embracing his identity as the new Supreme Leader of the First Order, repairing his broken mask and
Disney+ content on Hotstar
As a part of Disney acquiring Fox, Disney+ content will be streamed in India on Hotstar at no additional cost. The streaming platform will even localise content by dubbing or adding subtitles in local Indian languages for the country. https://dgit.in/DPlusHS
engaging in fights. There’s also Billy Dee Williams reprising his role as Lando, at the helm of the Millenium Falcon. It also looks like the story might be revisiting the origin of the story at Tatooine. After a “No one’s ever really gone,” voiceover from Luke, there’s the most discussed reveal of them all - the unmistakable cackle of Emperor Palpatine. https://dgit.in/SWTRoS
Toho expands in the west
Toho, the veteran Japanese studio behind the creation and ownership of Godzilla, is expanding in the United States with the goal of working more closely with Hollywood. It wants to enhance business around major characters. https://dgit.in/TohoWest www.digit.in | May 2019 | Digit | 43
Hotstar to get Disney+ shows
Content on Disney+ platform, will be available to Hotstar subscribers in India. https://dgit.in/may19-49
FEATURE
SCI-FI ON NETFLIX Netflix has a wide variety of Sci-Fi shows available to geek out on, and we have listed the ones that are fun to watch. The list is not ranked, but we have picked the lesser known ones.
JustWatch is a stream search engine to find the platform a particular movie or show is on. https://dgit.in/may19-50
SALVATION
A bright student at MIT discovers that a meteor is on a collision path towards Earth. What follows is the story of how various people and organisations tackle the problem. The plan is to use a Gravity Tractor, this is a vehicle that flies parallel to the potential impactor, and tries to bend it way from its path. As against other approaches such as just smashing the asteroid to bits, this method is painstaking and slow. Complicating all these attempts to save the world is that the US Government insists that all knowledge of the asteroid be kept secret from the general public.
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Aditya Madanapalle | aditya@digit.in
Check where it streams
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DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY
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This show is (loosely) based on the Douglas Adams novel of the same name. Dirk Gently, runs a detective agency that works on the premise that everything in the universe is connected to everything else. This means that you can analyse a piece of cake with enough detail to solve a murder case, and the same cake also actually has the solution to any case anywhere in the universe. In practice, Gently is just psychic. There is time travelling and soul swapping involved, so things go absolutely haywire. Elijah Wood is the sidekick to the detective, and is a grey character. Those who like Doctor Who will enjoy this show.
3%
This is a series set in a dystopian future, where most of the world lives in abject poverty. The episodes follow a group of people given a chance to go live in a techno-futuristic utopia. To do this, they have to pass a series of tests aimed at identifying only the best possible candidates. Each episode has something new to offer, and there are plenty of unexpected surprises. The narrative structure of the show is irregular as well, and this is not a linear series. The world keeps evolving drastically over the course of the series. Those who liked Exam or 12 Monkeys will really like this series. The series is originally in Portuguese and has been dubbed in English.
44 | Digit | May 2019 | www.digit.in
THE 100
The 100 has stunning CGI of a gigantic space station known as “The Ark” where most of humanity lives, the survivors of a nuclear apocalypse that made the Earth inhospitable to human life. The story spanning four seasons begins with a group of 100 prisoners dispatched to the Earth to check if the planet is suitable for human habitation. Vegetation has taken over much of the ruins of human civilisation. The 100 find a number of surprises on the ground, including mutated animals. Those who liked the initial seasons of Lost will like this show as well. There are five seasons of the show, with each changing up the stakes and the world quite a bit.
CONTINUUM
Continuum also has a cyberpunk aesthetic, and is set in a future where the world is governed by a corporate oligarchy. Most people have accepted reduced freedoms of assembly and speech, and are willingly part of the corporate dictatorship. A group of terrorists, known as Liber8 execute an attack and are sentenced to death. When they are about to be executed, the group uses a time travel device to go back in time and “fix” the world. A police officer also travels back in time with them. The rest of the story follows her actions as she tries to stop the terrorists. She has a cool suit that can make her invisible, protect her from bullets, tases people, and hacks tech.
WHAT’S NEW
The impact of flying cars
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THIS MONTH IN SCIENCE:
the trip would be associated with 52 percent lower emissions than one made with a petrol based vehicle, and 6 percent lower than an electric vehicle. However, for trips shorter than 35 kilometers, even with single occupancy, the conventional vehicles had a lower footprint. The average commute distance is 17 kilometers. The finding indicates that a world like the one shown in the Jetson’s would not be very good for the environment. https://dgit.in/jetcar
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SCIENCE IS THE PATH TO KNOWLEDGE, AND FINDING OUT ABOUT HOW OUR UNIVERSE WORKS. YOU CAN’T BE A GEEK AND NOT KNOW YOUR SCIENCE!
first of its kind study investigating the environmental impact of vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (VTOLs), colloquially known as flying cars, has found out that they would not offer a more sustainable option over short distances. The study examined the greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, and time saved as compared to the equivalent trips on conventional ground-based vehicles. For trips of 100 kilometers, ferrying three passengers, the flying cars would provide a more environmentally friendly option. While the vehicle itself would not have any emissions, there are emissions tied to the generation of the required electricity at power plants. In all,
The day the dinosaurs died
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round 65 million years ago, the Chicxulub meteorite impacted at the Yucatan peninsula, and is believed to be related to one of the largest mass extinctions known. The impact caused seismic waves, and associated surges that moved around the world faster than tsunamis could. Evidence of such surges is only known from marine deposits, and were unknown in the continental record… so far. Now, a
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The rare emerald icebergs, the mystery of the Kuiper Cliff, insulin pills and tractor beams...
newly discovered site in the Hell Creek Formation of North Dakota, is a continental record of a high energy surge. This is an exquisitely preserved site, and has an ultra high temporal fidelity. It is the first site to
provide a complete record of the Chicxulub impact event in a sub twenty four hour scale, and serves as a diary in stone. There are a variety of organisms fossilised in the record, including reptiles, dinosaurs, ammonites, fish, shark, microfauna, branches and trees. The site provides a record of the last day of the dinosaurs, and the studies on the site are only just beginning. https://dgit.in/dinoded
Lightning strikes twice!
A study has revealed that lightning often strikes twice, contrary to popular belief. A lightning strike occurs when a negative charge buildup in a thundercloud finds a channel to the ground through ionised air. The charge is not drained completely in a single strike, and the subsequent release can happen through the same channel. https://dgit.in/litstrik
Earliest life emerged in ponds?
Shallow pools of water less than 10 cm deep could trap enough nitrogen to catalyse the earliest forms of life. This key ingredient would not have been available in large enough quantities in oceans. A new study indicates that the earliest forms of life on Earth in ponds, not oceans. https://dgit.in/pndlyf
3D printed organs and food
Additive manufacturing of tissue has been difficult because of the time needed to print anything large enough to be useful, due to how quickly the tissue deteriorated. A new device uses multiple printers to manufacture many layers of the tissue simultaneously. https://dgit.in/3dfood
Fully automated DNA storage
Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft have successfully demonstrated fully automated DNA storage for the first time. This is a crucial step in moving the technology out of labs and making it more widely available. https://dgit.in/hellodna www.digit.in | May 2019 | Digit | 51
sci
Docking markers for space
The European Space Agency is developing docking markers for satellites to allow them to interface each other in orbit. https://dgit.in/may19-71
NASA’s robotic test platform is going to return to the ISS, this time with the addition of legs that can grab rails. https://dgit.in/may19-72
advocated the advantages of CMOS technology had a hard time, as they were seen as competition to those who were experts in the field of CCD technology. The earliest companies to adopt the technology were Kodak and GoPro. Almost all digital cameras in the world now use CMOS sensors. The two biggest sensor manufacturers in the world, Sony and Samsung both license the technology from Caltech, which holds the patents and manages NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The cameras that you use in your phones were originally developed for smaller and less energy intensive instruments for spacecraft. NASA engineers trying to make fuel flow efficiently in low gravity conditions, came up with the solution of using tiny particles of iron oxide to magnetise the fluid in 1960. More than half a century later, in 2012, Sony started using ferrofluids as a damper in their speakers, which is a kind of a brace that prevents the diaphragm from tearing. This allowed Sony to create slimmer speakers that they were able to accomodate in their televisions, home theatre systems, as well as movie theatres and recording studios. These ferrofluid based speakers improved the audio accuracy over traditional dampers, produced higher fidelity sound, and allowed for playback in higher volumes without distortion.
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SPACE AGE
Robonaut to return to space
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The technologies developed for space exploration often end up translating into products that are useful to humans down on Earth as well. These are the practical benefits of the space age.
Aditya Madanapalle | aditya@digit.in
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY The most widely used technology to emerge from NASA is the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. This is the kind of
60 | Digit | May 2019 | www.digit.in
sensor that is used in smartphones and action cameras. These sensors are more compact and less power intensive than their predecessors, the charge coupled device CCD sensors, which were preferred in the early days of digital photography, which was also a result of NASA developments in the 1960s. In its early days, those who
MATERIALS Gold has various properties that make it ideal for astronomical instruments. It is really inert and does not deteriorate over time, and it is good for reflecting infrared wavelengths, making it suitable for use in telescopes that study really distant objects. However, gold is notoriously soft, and requires the addition of other metals such as nickel or cobalt to give it strength, but the gold loses its reflectivity in the process. NASA contractor Epner came up with a proprietary gold coating method, that drives current from a gold cyanide anode to a negatively charged cathode, which is to be plated. The individual gold atoms are
Imaging: Anil VK
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cover story
you haven’t seen these marketing materials, but the same does get distilled down into reviews. Many a times there is a reviewer’s guide provided with the product and the review often ends up being exactly what has been provided without an iota of independent thought. That’s the state of things right now.
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So instead, we’re going to help educate you. Processors, no matter whichever domain they’re from can be very intimidating to read about, primarily because of the complexity involved. So we’ve tried to simply the basic functionalities of processors, graphics processors and SoCs. This way, you’ll get an understanding of what matters and what doesn’t. We also focus on how these processing wonders are benchmarked and how you can glean worthy information from a review rather than just reading which SKU managed to get more points than the other in a synthetic benchmark that’s never going to be indicative of real world performance
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very intelligent gadget we come across has a tiny piece of silicon to thank for its intelligence. We’re not talking about artificial intelligence but simply acting on the basis of an input without the need for any hand holding is also intelligent. It seems like such gadgets have a mind of their own and in a way, that is correct. Practically everyone on the planet knows what a processor is and yet most of them make the mistake of misidentifying one things from the other. We can’t even count the number of times that people have identified massive computer chassis that sit next to your monitor as CPUs. Those things do have a CPU in them but they aren’t that massive. Pet peeves aside, the average joe who until a few years ago had no inkling about processors and SoCs, is now capable of belting out the names of all major smartphone SoCs with their eyes closed. Yet they don’t even have the basic understanding of what exactly the SoC does, or for that matter, how one differs from the other.
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Even when it comes to the performance, most folks are completely in the dark and possess knowledge that’s at best defined as half-baked. Their source of information is based on the marketing slides that smartphone companies proudly display on massive screens and their livestreams during their launch events. These marketing materials often stretch the truth and don’t provide the right message. Perhaps
Lastly, there is a lot of jargon involved in such complicated stories. If at all you do feel zoned out after reading through what appears to be Greek and Latin, then check out the jargon busters which have been placed throughout all the stories. No matter what part of the story you read, we hope you’ll gain some valuable insight into how these silicon wonders work and be empowered to make the right buying decisions when you’re looking for an upgrade.
INDEX:
Understanding your CPU..................................................................66 GPU architecture explored...............................................................70 Smartphone SoCs................................................................................74 How it’s designed and made...........................................................78 www.digit.in | May 2019 | Digit | 65
WHAT’S NEW
Why Facts do not change perceptions
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book called The Enigma of Reason, Harvard researchers investigate why our minds don’t change even when facts are presented. It argues that cooperation is the biggest advantage of the species, and that given the choice, humans will almost always choose freeloading, as reasoning evolved not to solve abstract problems, but problems that arise from living in a collaborative environment. https://dgit.in/fctrsn
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THIS IS TECHNOLOGY, CULTURE AND SCIENCE WITH A DIFFERENCE, AND THAT DIFFERENCE IS USUALLY ENOUGH TO MAKE MOST NORMAL PEOPLE GO “WTF?”
n the 1970s, Stanford researchers conducted a series of studies. Undergraduates were asked to sort pairs of suicide notes – one real and one fake. One group was told that they were particularly gifted, while the other was told they did a terrible job. Then, everyone was told that they had been lied to, and that everyone was merely average. After that, both groups were asked to grade their own performance. The group that was told it was special scored themselves higher, and the group that was told they were below average scored themselves lower. Subsequent studies have also demonstrated that perceptions are incredibly difficult to change once they have been formed. In a new
The PowerPoint slide that killed seven people
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n 16 January 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a mission that was scheduled to last a little less than 16 days. During takeoff, a piece of foam broke off from one of support structures, and struck the left wing of the shuttle. An insulation tile on the wing, designed to protect the shuttle from the heat of re-entry was damaged. To assess the damage,
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The most famous equations, planets that are alive, B&O speakers, an electric hypercar, a smart fan, Game of Thrones, Shazam, Love Death and Robots, and much more...
Fake vacation photo services
If all you really want from a vacation are photos for social media feeds, then it is cheaper to just pay professional photo editors to fake the vacation, and there are services cropping up that cater to this emerging market. https://dgit.in/fakevac
Robot fights Notre Dame fire
A giant robot called Colossus from Shark Robotics helped put out the blaze at Notre Dame by manoeuvring to places that were too risky for the firefighters. The joystick operated robot has a water cannon that can pump out 2500 litres of water every second. https://dgit.in/robotff
NASA managers sat down with engineers from Boeing, who had a PowerPoint presentation. One
slide showed that they had only tested impacts by pieces of foam that were 600 times smaller
Warner signs deal with algorithm
Warner Music has become the first major record label to sign a deal with an algorithm. The deal is with German mood application Endel, which creates custom soundscapes. The deal is for 20 albums over the course of 2019, out of which five have already been released. https://dgit.in/algomusic
than the chunk that struck Columbia. The Boeing Engineers left feeling confident that they had communicated the risks of re-entry sufficiently. On 1 February, 2003, Columbia exploded with seven crew on board. A professor in communication from Yale University reviewed the slide in question and found problems with it, including a misleading title, an illogical hierarchy of information, and vague terms. https://dgit.in/klrppt
To pi or not to pi?
Pi has an infinite series of numbers after the decimal point, but how far should we count? According to NASA scientists, 40 decimal places are enough to accurately measure the circumference of the known universe, with a degree of accuracy that is within the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. https://dgit.in/accupi
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The science of beheading
The end of the calorie
FEATURE
Living
This measure to quantify food according to how fat it will make us, is not suitable for the job https://dgit.in/may19-84
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200 years ago, a man slapped the severed head of Charlotte Corday and got a frown in return. https://dgit.in/may19-83
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Planets In movies, comics and video games, some planets are not just dead chunks of rocks, but planets with a consciousness. Aditya Madanapalle | aditya@digit.in
n scientific terms, there is very little reason for a planet to actually evolve into a sentient being. There is a lack of competition for resources, and there is just no reason for intelligence to emerge. Even if a single organism, such as an algae were to spread across the entire surface, it would one of the most successful species even if it were at the bottom of the food chain, without any evolutionary pressures pushing it towards sentience. The most plausible route for a planet wide intelligence is the advancement of insect mounds or hives, to form a superorganism with a hivemind. In the Foundation series, there is even a sentient Galaxy that evolves out of a sentient world, and is known as
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Galaxia. In philosophy, the doctrine of panpsychism says that everything in the universe, even the tiniest subatomic particles, have some amount of consciousness ingrained within them. Extrapolated to the largest scales, this would mean that the entire universe itself is a single, giant consciousness.
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CYBERTRON
Cybertron is a sentient planet, and is the spherical form of Primus, a cosmic singularity, which can be considered as the highest form of
intelligence. The origins of Primus is in another older Universe, one that existed before the big bang. Cybertron is the homeworld of the Transformers, and all the life forms on the planet are robotic. The planet spent some early days in orbit around Alpha Centauri, but then drifted through space and has no fixed location. The size of the planet keeps changing in different adaptations from being Saturn-sized to smaller than the Earth.
BALMERA Balmera are spherical, planet sized living creatures that share a deep connection with the species that inhabit them. While the origins of the creature are unknown, the single specimen seems to be petrified. Even when im-
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