The New York Yankees made a major investment in esports, the team revealed today. They’re now stakeholders in one of the most well-known North American esports team organizations: Echo Fox.

The New York Yankees announced an investment in Vision Esports today, a company that holds stake in three different esports organizations including Echo Fox. Echo Fox, founded by three-time NBA champion Rick Fox, has teams competing in League of Legends, Call of Duty, H1Z1, and a handful of fighting games.

Along with Echo Fox, the Yankees’ move includes investments in Twin Galaxies (a community that logs video game world records and player rankings, mostly for old-school arcade games) and Vision Entertainment (a company that produces scripted and unscripted esports videos). Read more…

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Source: Mashable | The New York Yankees just broke into esports

If last year’s Google Home was the speaker that proved Google Assistant is worthy Amazon competitor, the Google Home Mini is the one that will get people hooked.

The smaller Google Home has all the same smarts as its larger counterparts, but at less than half the price. It’s difficult to see how that doesn’t shake out as a win for Google.

Functionally, the $49 Google Home Mini is very similar to the original Google Home. The disc-shaped speaker is covered in cloth similar to what’s on the base of the larger model.

The Home Mini comes in just three colors: chalk, charcoal, and coral. And, unlike the bigger Google Home speakers, there’s no way to swap out the color, which would have been nice, but at less than fifty bucks it’s hard to complain. Even with the limited colors, I still very much prefer Google’s unassuming design to Amazon’s hunks of black plastic. Read more…

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Source: Mashable | The Google Home Mini is here to get you hooked on Google Assistant

We got our first thorough look at Star Wars: Battlefront II‘s single player mode with a new trailer today, and it looks action-packed and filled with emotion.

Players control Commander Iden Versio, a soldier who serves in the Galactic Empire and is the Inferno Squad’s leader. Having grown up under the influence of the Galactic Empire, Versio was bent on finding and killing rebels, including the destroyer of the Death Star, Luke Skywalker.

Even if loot boxes end up ruining the multiplayer aspect of Battlefront II, at least the single player story seems enticing. Read more…

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Source: Mashable | The 'Star Wars Battlefront II' single player trailer is intense

Google’s DeepMind lab has built an artificially intelligent program that taught itself to become one of the world’s most dominant Go players. Google says the program, AlphaGo Zero, endowed itself with “superhuman abilities,” learning strategies previously unknown to humans. 

AlphaGo Zero started out with no clue how to win the game Go — a 2,500-year old Chinese game in which two players use black and white tiles to capture more territory than their opponents. 

It took AlphaGo Zero just three days to beat an earlier AI program (AlphaGo Lee), which had resoundingly beaten world champion Lee Sedol in 2016. After 21 days of playing, AlphaGo Zero defeated AlphaGo Master, an intelligent program known for beating 60 top pros online and another world champion player in 2017. By day 40, AlphaGo Zero had defeated all previous AI versions of AlphaGo. Read more…

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Source: Mashable | Google's AlphaGo Zero taught itself to become the greatest Go player in history