Playing with AI

By 2017, AI had advanced far enough for AlphaGo, a specialised AI that can play the highly complex board game Go, to beat the major Go players in the world and be awarded professional 9-dan by the Chinese Weiqi Association. Go, however, is a fully deterministic game like Chess, with no random elements. Probabilistic games like Pandemic, on the other hand, are even trickier for AI to play efficiently, as the randomness of dice rolls or shuffled cards makes it much harder for computers to crack them. This problem inspired me (Konstantinos Sfikas) to attempt to create an AI that can play the Pandemic board game.

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Teaching at the seams

The term ‘seamless,’ adopted from fabric or surface production, refers to non-visible gaps or spaces between materials. In education, ‘seamless’ is quite analogous as it refers to smoothened transitions in a student’s educational voyage. 

But are these seams strong enough?

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Bridging the Gap: Bone grafts of the future

Better recovery for patients, reduced need for revision surgeries, and many hundreds of thousands of euros saved for public health and industry. That could be the outcome of four years’ intense work by engineers and medical professionals at the University of Malta and Mater Dei Hospital in developing biodegradable metal-based tailor-made bone scaffolds. Cassi Camilleri writes.

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In the Palm of our Hands

How do you help children adjust to living with diabetes? For Clayton Saliba, a Master of Fine Arts in Digital Arts graduate, the solution lies in the palm of our hands. By combining digital arts and medical information Clayton developed Digitus, an app designed to help children better understand diabetes symptoms. 

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A Car Country

alking or cycling are challenging in Malta’s car-dominated infrastructure. ‘Active Travel’ is a University of Malta (UM) scheme that encourages students and staff to ditch cars in favour of healthier, greener alternatives. But changing Malta’s car culture is no walk in the park. Prof. Maria Attard (Director, Institute for Climate Change & Sustainable Development, UM) and Raphael Mizzi (UM’s Green Travel Plan Coordinator) speak to Jonathan Firbank about the project.

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