News of the week: price of a Hyperloop ticket in Russia, mining on the Apollo computer program, AI-bot in StarCraft II

In this issue read:

• calculated ticket price for Hyperloop from Moscow to St. Petersburg;
• on the computer of the Apollo program they tried to mine bitcoin;
• VAIO has released a laptop with a large number of ports;
• video games don't make people cruel, they are just games;
• IBM closes Red Hat Linux acquisition deal;
• Russian software developers will get 15 billion support;
• AlphaStar will battle in StarCraft II on Battle.net.

From Moscow to St. Petersburg on Hyperloop

')
The Institute for Problems of Natural Monopolies (IPEM) has calculated the cost of transportation based on the Hyperloop system between Moscow and St. Petersburg . Taking into account the construction of infrastructure, which will be about 1.18 trillion rubles, excluding the cost of land acquisition, the cost of travel will be 27.5 thousand rubles. If the state helps to implement this project, the ticket price should fall to 16.1 thousand rubles, which is still too much for the average passenger.

“The main consumer of the Hyperloop transport system with a calculated ticket price can only be the business community and the population with a high level of prosperity, but this audience will not be able to provide the passenger traffic necessary for the project payback in the foreseeable future. In this regard, the construction of the Hyperloop system between Moscow and St. Petersburg with the expectation of operating income seems inappropriate, ”the study authors say.

On the computer program "Apollo" tried bit mining Bitcoins

Electronics specialist Ken Shiriff was able to restore the Apollo on-board control computer. After the computer was brought to a working state, bitcoins tried to mine on the machine. It is about working with a computer that controlled both the command and lunar modules during missions to the moon.

Actually, there were no surprises - this computer is not suitable for such calculations. “Attempting to mine bitcoins at AGC seemed pointless. Processing the bitcoin hash algorithm in assembly language on this 15-bit computer of the 60s was a difficult task, but I made it work, ”writes Ken.

“AGC spends 5.15 seconds on one SHA-256 hash. Since bitcoin uses a double hash, this results in a hash rate of 10.3 seconds per hash. The computer will spend a billion times more time than the age of the universe is to successfully get one block. ”

VAIO introduced a laptop with a bunch of connectors and ports

VAIO introduced a new model of the laptop - SX12 . The diagonal of the display device - 12.5 inches, but the main "chip" of this device is not in the screen. The fact is that the developers have equipped the device with a large number of ports, larger than almost any modern laptop.

As for the latter, the SX12 has almost all the connectors that may be needed in the process. These are three USB-A ports, a USB-C port, a full-sized SD card slot, a headphone port, Ethernet, and even VGA, which are overlooked by an overwhelming number of manufacturers. True, the device is worth a lot. For the basic version you will have to pay a little over $ 1000, for the older version the company asks for twice as much.

Researchers: No, video games don't make people cruel

Recently, researchers from the University of Stetson in the United States presented the results of another study, the purpose of which was to find out the effect of video games on the psychological and emotional state of a person . As it turned out, video games do not make people want to show aggression in real life.

The study was long-term - its duration was about two years. As a result, it turned out that aggressive games are not associated with any of the scenarios of antisocial behavior. "The data from this study do not confirm the conclusion that video games are the cause of aggression or refusal of prosocial behavior among young people," says the article.

IBM became the owner of Red Hat

IBM announced the final closure of a deal to buy an open source software provider Red Hat for $ 34 billion. According to IBM, there will be no pressure on the new asset, the company will save its neutrality. In the near future, the release of the next generation hybrid multi-cloud platform is planned.

“When we talk to customers, their problems are clear: they need to move faster and differentiate using technology,” said Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst in a prepared statement. “They want to build more collaborative cultures, and they need solutions that give them the flexibility to create and deploy any application or workload anywhere.” We believe that open source has become the de facto standard in technology, because it allows the creation of such solutions. Teaming up with IBM gives Red Hat the ability to bring more open source innovations to an even wider range of organizations and allow us to scale to meet the need for hybrid cloud solutions that provide true choice and flexibility. ”

Russian software developers will provide 15 billion rubles

Import substitution is sweeping across Russia - now developers of domestic software will receive about 15 billion rubles of support . Funds will be allocated in the framework of the program "Digital Economy". The project is already being prepared by a group in the direction of "Information Security" at the ANO "Digital Economy".

It should be noted that the final amount of the grant may be more, the exact amount of assistance has not yet been determined. A third of the amount is allocated by the federal budget, and another two thirds are declared as extra-budgetary funding.

DeepMind AlphaStar will play StarCraft II gamers on Battle.net

The company DeepMind announced that its AI, AlphaStar, will play on real servers with real people in StarCraft II. Fights are planned to be held in StarCaraft rating mode, while opponents will not know that their opponent is a car.


Selection of opponents will be made in random order, which will allow to hold competitions in realistic conditions. Unfortunately, the total number of games that are planned to be held, as well as their frequencies, the developers do not disclose. In this case, it is known that both the victory and the defeat of users will be counted in the same way as is done in regular MMR games.