Links: Hasbro Holds on to Star Wars, and Mystery House and Mandala Win Awards

Escape rooms are currently very popular with young and old alike – so it's great that there is an exit game for home enjoyment with the Mystery House from Cranio Creations! The cards are placed in the mysteriously designed 3D playing field according to coordinates. Each player can now peek into it and look for clues. Whoever finds one types the coordinates of the card into an accompanying app on the tablet — and receives items that help further solve this puzzle.

The pact, which Hasbro and Disney extended back in 2013, was expected to expire in 2020. Financial terms were not disclosed.

"We are pleased to build on our relationship with Disney and extend our agreement for Marvel and Star Wars franchises," Brian Goldner, Hasbro's chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "Disney's celebrated franchises are consistently ranked as top toy properties and provide expansive content for us to build upon for years to come."

Hasbro has long benefited from its relationship with Disney. In the last year, Hasbro's partner brands revenue rose 24% to $1.22 billion. The company pointed to strong sales of "Frozen 2," "Avengers," "Spider-Man" and "Star Wars" lines for the increase.

Since 2018, [Lara] Martin [, a graduate student at Georgia Tech,] has published work that outlines progress towards the goal of making an AI Dungeon Master. Her approach combines state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms with more old-fashioned rule-based features. Together this lets an AI system dream up different narratives while following the thread of a story consistently.

Martin's latest work, presented at a conference held this month by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, describes a way for an algorithm to use the concept of "events," consisting of a subject, verb, object, and other elements, in a coherent narrative. She trained the system on the storyline of such science fiction shows as Doctor Who, Futurama, and The X-Files. Then, when fed a snippet of text, it will identify events, and use them to shape a continuation of the plot churned out by a neural network. In another project, completed last year, Martin developed a way to guide a language model towards a particular event, such as two characters getting married.