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Google Cloud developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao and her colleagues once again claim to have calculated Pi to a new record number of digits. Iwao says that the team has calculated the mathematical constant to 100 trillion digital decimal places.

Iwao and her team previously set the record in 2019 when they carried out a calculation to an accuracy of 31.4 trillion digits. The benchmark has been broken a few times since then, including when researchers from a Swiss university calculated Pi to 82.8 trillion digits last year — twice as many as the Google team attained a few years back. Iwao and her team are working with Guinness World Records for official validation of their achievement as a world record.

In a blog post, Iwao wrote that finding as many digits of Pi as possible is a way to measure the progress of compute power. Her job involves showing off what Google Cloud is capable of, so it's not too surprising that Iwao tapped into the power of the platform to perform the calculation. 

In 2019, the calculation (which figured out a third as many digits as the most recent attempt) took 121 days. This time around, the calculation ran for 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7.651 seconds, meaning the computers were running more than twice as quickly despite Iwao using "the same tools and techniques." Around 82,000 terabytes of data were processed overall. 

Iwao also notes that reading all 100 trillion digits out loud at a rate of one per second would take more than 3.1 million years. And in case you're wondering, the 100-trillionth decimal place of Pi is 0. 

It’s June, and video game fans across the globe know what that means – it’s not E3. Again. The old, in-person gaming show has been canceled for the third year in a row, but this summer will still be filled with news and virtual events, thanks in large part to Canada’s sweetheart Geoff Keighley.

It all takes place in early June, which is like right now, so let’s take a look at the schedule for Summer Game Fest and break down what to expect from the studios involved.

Summer Game Fest is less a singular event and more a state of mind. It comprises a handful of virtual shows spread over 10 days, starting on June 2nd with the PlayStation State of Play stream. This one already happened, and it was short and sweet, focusing on content for PlayStation VR 2. Capcom kicked things off with a reveal of the Resident Evil 4 remake, the announcement of a VR version of Resident Evil: Village, and a release window of 2023 for Street Fighter 6. Square Enix also showed off the first gameplay trailer for Final Fantasy XVI, complete with a 2023 timeframe for launch. Oddly enough, there’s still no word on when the PSVR2 will actually come out.

Capcom

After that, Activision is hosting its own little party for the reveal of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II on June 8th at 1pm ET. The game is a sequel to 2019's Modern Warfare and a reboot of the series. This show literally just wrapped up, and Activision shared its plans to bring Modern Warfare II's technology to the new Warzone, which will land after October this year. No Russian, the controversial airport mission from the original Modern Warfare II, will not be included in the reboot.

Summer Game Fest officially kicks off with a big live-streamed event on June 9th at 2pm ET. Hosted by Keighley, the show is expected to be two hours long and will feature announcements from the usual suspects, including 2K, Atlus, Bloober Team, Capcom, EA, Epic Games, Warner Bros. and Square Enix. The Day of the Devs stream directly after the main show will spotlight indie games specifically, backed by iam8bit and Double Fine.

Not much has been publicly confirmed for the kickoff show, but we’ll definitely get a fresh look at Gotham Knights, an appearance by The Rock, and lots of raw gameplay footage, according to Keighley. Even with State of Play last week, there’s still room for Capcom to drop some details about DLC for Resident Evil: Village, and for Square Enix to showcase Forspoken, which comes out in October. Atlus may show off something in the Persona universe, and rumor has it Bloober Team is working on a Silent Hill game — but it could also be building a new Layers of Fear.

Next on the calendar is indie publisher Devolver Digital, with a Twitch stream on June 9th at 6pm ET, the same night as the main Summer Game Fest event. It’s Devolver, so this show’s gonna be weird. It’s gonna have a lot of f-bombs. It’s gonna leave you with the feeling that Devolver is scrappy and relatable, but also way too cool for you. It’s gonna try really hard to disguise the fact that yes, even Devolver’s show is simply another long ad from a company entrenched in the video game industry’s multibillion dollar corporate system – but most of all, I bet it’ll be funny as hell. Devolver always puts on a good show, and they always have a rich roster of indie developers to choose from. This year should be no different, with Suda51 hosting the stream and recent hits like Death’s Door, Inscryption, Trek to Yomi and Weird West on the publisher’s roster.

Half Mermaid

On June 10th, there’s a Netflix Geeked Week stream followed by a Tribeca Games Spotlight focusing on a curated selection of upcoming indie titles, including Immortality, Thirsty Suitors, As Dusk Falls and Oxenfree II. And then, on June 12th, it’s time for the most E3 event of the summer – the Xbox and Bethesda showcase.

The Xbox and Bethesda stream kicks off at 1pm ET on Sunday, June 12th. There are no confirmed announcements so far, but the show’s cosmic marketing scheme suggests we’ll see something from Starfield, Bethesda’s huge new sci-fi RPG. This will be bittersweet for anyone who’s been following the game’s development – just last month, Bethesda delayed Starfield into the first half of 2023, pushing it back from an initial release date of November 11th, 2022. Aside from a few teaser videos and dev diaries, we haven’t seen much of Starfield, and the Xbox show is the ideal time to break out some actual gameplay and maybe even convince fans that the delay will be worthwhile.

It’s very possible we’ll get a good look at another delayed Bethesda property – Redfall, the open-world, co-op vampire shooter developed by Dishonored studio Arkane. Redfall was originally supposed to come out this summer, but Bethesda pushed it into the first half of 2023 alongside Starfield. It’d be great to see some gameplay from this title, since so far the marketing has consisted of stylized, cinematic videos. And to round out the Bethesda properties, there’s always a chance that Elder Scrolls 6 will make an appearance, considering we haven’t seen anything about it since 2018 – you know, back when E3 was still a thing.

But that’s enough about Bethesda – Xbox owns 23 game studios and it has Game Pass, the company’s subscription game-streaming service that’s sure to be mentioned every other minute during the show. Other potential hits for the Xbox stream include Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, the next Forza Motorsport, and maybe even something about the new Fable that was announced in 2020. And of course there’s always room for Halo: Infinite updates.

Ninja Theory

With Sony and Microsoft chugging along in the latest console generation, the focus right now is on software, and both studios have plenty to prove in this space. Sony barely participated in the summer’s events and the company doesn’t seem interested in talking about major in-house projects like God of War: Ragnarok or Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2. Meanwhile, two significant delays from Xbox this year were a big blow to the company’s reputation, especially considering how important first-party exclusives are in a subscription-based ecosystem. Xbox promises to include its blockbuster games in Game Pass subscriptions on day one, at no extra charge, while that isn’t the case with Sony’s new subscription service, PlayStation Plus Premium. This poses a significant consumer-facing advantage for Xbox and I expect to hear a lot about first-party exclusives in Game Pass during the company’s big show.

And with that, it looks like Summer Game Fest is done – but there’s still plenty more gaming news to come this year. Nintendo loves to host digital showcases whenever it damn well pleases and we’re just about due for another one; EA usually has a show of its own at some point; Sony still has plenty of PSVR2 and PS Plus Premium details to share, and Microsoft will never stop talking about Game Pass. In fact, Xbox is hosting a second showcase on June 14th. And when all else fails, there are so many indie games, you guys. Let’s all have some fun.

Let’s get this out of the way: No Russian will not be included in the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. In fact, the game will penalize friendly fire and fail players who shoot civilians while in combat.

This is in stark contrast to the No Russian mission from the original Modern Warfare II, which came out in 2009 – in this level, players were instructed to shoot their way through a busy airport, killing civilians en masse alongside a Russian terrorist organization. The protagonist was undercover, trying to infiltrate the cell for the CIA, and even though it was possible to skip this section or play it without firing a single shot, the fictional peer pressure to kill as many people as possible was strong.

No Russian sparked heavy controversy with the release of Modern Warfare II. Though Call of Duty has made billions gamifying the horrors of war, many players balked at the idea of role-playing as a mass shooter targeting unarmed civilians. The mission came with a content warning in the US and it was censored internationally. Infinity Ward and Activision were forced to publicly justify its inclusion, arguing against the idea that it was tone-deaf, ham-fisted and needlessly disturbing.

With the 2022 version of Modern Warfare II, Infinity Ward is avoiding the conversation altogether. In response to the question, “Can you confirm whether the No Russian mission will be included in the new game, in any form?” an Activision spokesperson responded as follows:

“No. There are NPC civilians in the game, but you will be penalized for friendly fires. If civilians are caught in the crossfire, players will automatically get a mission fail.”

Activision

This fits with the overall vibe of the new Modern Warfare II. At a media briefing ahead of its reveal, Infinity Ward developers emphasized the game’s entertainment value over serious wartime themes, at one point using the phrase, "fun for everyone." They said they wanted this Modern Warfare II to be realistic, but still "cool." Without mentioning No Russian specifically, developers said the goal of the original game was to be provocative, while this year’s version was aiming to be heroic.

With Modern Warfare II, Infinity Ward is sticking to the fun bits of war. The game still deals in real-world themes of organized violence, large-scale military action and shadowy terrorist groups – but no joke, I’ve never heard Call of Duty developers use the word “fun” so freely in a pre-release briefing.

This may be because Modern Warfare II marks the beginning of a fresh approach to Call of Duty for Activision, with pivotal implications for the future of Warzone specifically. When the next version of Warzone comes out after October of this year, it will include the AI improvements, new vehicle behaviors and upgraded physics of Modern Warfare II, and both games will run on the same engine.

Activision

“A wholly new Warzone will launch as an extension of the Modern Warfare II universe,” an Activision spokesperson said. “With it comes new technology, new features, and new gameplay that work seamlessly together…. In order to fully deliver this state-of-the-art experience, Warzone 2.0 will feature new Modern Warfare II content and systems with brand new progression and inventories. Today’s Warzone will continue on as a separate experience that will include a continuation of player progression and inventories within that Warzone experience.”

Modern Warfare II is scheduled to come out on October 28th. Warzone 2.0 should land soon after, according to Activision.

Modern Warfare II is a sequel to 2019’s Modern Warfare, which rebooted the series but kept familiar themes and characters like Captain John Price. The new game follows Price’s Task Force 141 and Mexican Special Forces as they attempt to thwart terrorist plans across the globe.

“We love telling stories,” Infinity Ward head writer Brian Bloom said. “Story is character and character is story, and that's writery stuff that writers sometimes say internally, but it boils down to a simple thing. If you have a plot, who’s in it, what’s happening?”

With Modern Warfare II, developers focused on refining water physics and figuring out how combat works above and below the surface. One level they showed off, Wet Work, had the player sneak into a marina by swimming around docked boats, taking out security forces by throwing knives and shooting a pistol upward through the water. In the new game, shooting underwater reduces the impact of each bullet, whether it breaks the surface or not, but the pistol otherwise operates normally.

These new water physics will apply to multiplayer portions of the game, as well as Warzone 2.0. In terms of multiplayer for Modern Warfare II, developers have taken observational data from past Call of Duty games to identify three main player behaviors: aggressive, defensive and reactionary, each of them with assault and stealth variants. The game’s default loadouts fall into the resulting six categories. As for vehicles, it’s possible to shoot their doors and tires off, complete on-the-fly repairs, and get a 360 degree view when leaning out of a window. Amphibious vehicles and a helicopter troop carrier also make an appearance in multiplayer.

New multiplayer maps come in large-scale and traditional sizes, and there’s a new 6v6 mode called Knockout that infuses Gunfight with a multiplayer component. Players have one life (with revive) and one minute on the timer, and a bag randomly spawns in one of three locations. The winner is the last person left alive or the person holding the bag when time runs out.

Activision

The AI systems in Modern Warfare II have been tweaked to better facilitate emergent gameplay and mimic real-world scenarios, while Infinity Ward is running internal tests on maps with 300 AI characters and 100 live players. Call of Duty’s Ricochet Anti-Cheat system will be live in Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2.0 on day one.

Infinity Ward creative director and co-head Patrick Kelly teased what this could all mean for Warzone 2.0 and the future of Call of Duty in his introductory speech, saying, “What if there was tons and tons of AI in the world and things like that, and there was tons of players and stuff like that? That could be potentially really cool, right? We want a scenario where everyone is playing together, having fun and playing how they want to play and what they want to play.”

As long as it’s not No Russian.

Microsoft inadvertently learned the risks of creating racist AI, but what happens if you deliberately point the intelligence at a toxic forum? One person found out. As Motherboard and The Verge note, YouTuber Yannic Kilcher trained an AI language model using three years of content from 4chan's Politically Incorrect (/pol/) board, a place infamous for its racism and other forms of bigotry. After implementing the model in ten bots, Kilcher set the AI loose on the board — and it unsurprisingly created a wave of hate. In the space of 24 hours, the bots wrote 15,000 posts that frequently included or interacted with racist content. They represented more than 10 percent of posts on /pol/ that day, Kilcher claimed.

Nicknamed GPT-4chan (after OpenAI's GPT-3), the model learned to not only pick up the words used in /pol/ posts, but an overall tone that Kilcher said blended "offensiveness, nihilism, trolling and deep distrust." The video creator took care to dodge 4chan's defenses against proxies and VPNs, and even used a VPN to make it look like the bot posts originated from the Seychelles.

The AI made a few mistakes, such as blank posts, but was convincing enough that it took roughly two days for many users to realize something was amiss. Many forum members only noticed one of the bots, according to Kilcher, and the model created enough wariness that people accused each other of being bots days after Kilcher deactivated them.

The YouTuber characterized the experiment as a "prank," not research, in conversation with The Verge. It's a reminder that trained AI is only as good as its source material. The concern instead stems from how Kilcher shared his work. While he avoided providing the bot code, he shared a partly neutered version of the model with the AI repository Hugging Face. Visitors could have recreated the AI for sinister purposes, and Hugging Face decided to restrict access as a precaution. There were clear ethical concerns with the project, and Kilcher himself said he should focus on "much more positive" work in the future.

If you're looking for a new DAW (or digital workstation) for making music, it's worth taking a look at Ableton's latest sale. The company has temporarily dropped the price of all of its software by 25 percent, including Ableton Live 11, which is perhaps the most popular DAW around.

Live 11 Intro (which includes the essentials), is down from $99 to $74. Live 11 Standard, which unlocks all the DAW's features and adds some extras, has dropped from $449 to $337. At the top end, there's the complete integrated studio of Live 11 Suite. That currently costs $562, down from the regular price of $749. The same 25 percent discount applies to packs.

Ableton offers students and teachers up to 40 percent off Live, but it doesn't hold sales like this all too often. If you're not an educator or in school, these are likely among the best deals you'll find on the company's software. The sale runs until June 14th.

Earlier this year, Ableton rolled out the first major update for Live 11. Among the additions was native support for Apple Silicon-powered Macs. That should mean the DAW runs more efficiently on systems with an M1 or M2 chip, in case you have a recent Mac and were on the fence about snagging it.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Twitter is introducing another shopping feature as it slowly tries to ramp up its in-app commerce features. The company’s latest experiment is product drops, which allows users to get notifications ahead of in-demand product launches.

The company says the feature is meant to capitalize on how Twitter is already used to build hype for limited edition or particularly in-demand products. Companies using product drops will be able to tweet links to upcoming launches and users can sign up for in-app notifications to be reminded ahead of the launch. As with other Twitter shopping features, the app won’t actually handle the transaction, it just directs users’ to the retailer or brands’s website.

Initially, product drops will only be available in the United States to people using the Twitter app in English. The first brands to get their hands on the feature include Dior, Home Depot and Fossil’s collabs with designer Jeff Staple.

Compared with most of its peers, Twitter has been pretty late to bring e-commerce features into its app, though the company has said it sees the area as a significant opportunity. Twitter has also experimented with shopping in livestreams and allowing retailers to create in-app storefronts on their profiles.

Every gameplay mechanic and design decision in Stray is driven by a single idea: Because you’re a cat. The world of Stray is filled with anthropomorphic robots, futuristic Hong Kong-inspired streets and makeshift skyscrapers built on heaping piles of trash, and it all serves as a playground for the protagonist, an orange tabby on a mission to escape the city and reunite with its family. And knock over as many delicate objects as possible, of course.

In a hands-off preview event for Stray, producer Swann Martin-Raget of BlueTwelve Studio consistently repeated the phrase, “because you’re a cat,” justifying his decisions to topple various items, jump to precarious ledges and curl up to sleep on top of buildings.

“It is required to scratch every wall and sofa because you’re a cat and that's very, very important,” he said, the orange tabby digging its claws into a random robot’s couch cushion.

Set pieces that would be afterthoughts in games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or Cyberpunk 2077 are integral to Stray’s gameplay. A paint can left on a rooftop, the textured arm of a sofa, a bucket abandoned in the corner – from the perspective of a cat, these items are irresistible, and in Stray players are rewarded for succumbing to every feline instinct. Gameplay relies on curiosity and freewheeling exploration, with platforming challenges, physics riddles and spatial puzzles built into the environments at cat-level.

BlueTwelve Studio

Take that abandoned bucket for example. As a cat, players can pick it up with the handle in their mouth and chuck it into a fan on the side of a building, jamming the blades and opening up a new walkway. Scratching walls and sofa cushions makes the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller rumble, and pawing at doors can open up new areas to explore. After knocking over that rooftop paint can – because you’re a cat – and spilling yellow goo all over the floor of an empty warehouse, players can walk through the spill, leaving small paw prints in their wake.

This last example isn’t exactly crucial to game progression, but it’s one of the many adorable details that bring Stray to life.

BlueTwelve Studio

Plenty of actions in Stray exist simply because they make sense for a cat protagonist (and probably because they’re cute as hell). There’s a discrete button to meow, even during some cutscenes, and the robots react with shock and frustration when the cat cuts across their board game, throwing pieces to the floor. It’s possible to curl up and sleep basically any time, anywhere – even directly on top of a robot stranger. When the cat gets pets and cuddles from the robots, it purrs and the DualSense’s haptics fire up in response.

“You really feel that you are holding a cat in your hands,” Martin-Raget said. “So that's quite nice.”

But even seemingly innocuous actions can drive the narrative in Stray. There’s an abandoned couch and television set in a back alley of the city, and the cat can turn on the TV and learn more about the world through news programs and ads. The cat’s momentum will make some platforms pivot when it jumps to them, creating new passageways as they swing. The robots are living full lives in every corner of the city, and it’s possible to walk by and gather information from some of them, learning more about the citizens in each environment. The local barman is particularly good in this regard, as barmen in adventure games tend to be.

As cute as all of this sounds, Stray tempers the sweetness with dystopian background details. For instance, End Village is a community built on a sea of trash in an abandoned reservoir, with robots living in a makeshift tower sprouting out of the debris. The robots here are struggling but complacent, and the environment is in stark contrast to the neon lights and vending machines of the main city. In End Village, the cat can roam around, using dangling buckets as elevators and disrupting board games, and there’s a mission to collect flowers for a robot called Zbaltazar, who has knowledge to share about escaping the city.

“End Village is a very interesting example because it shows how we can really use the fact that we are playing as a cat to have fun in level design, in terms of verticality, for example, or types of paths that you can find,” Martin-Raget said. “You can still be, you know, annoying to everyone if you want to.” Because you’re a cat, it goes without saying.

There’s no fall damage in Stray, meaning every jump is a successful one, and dying isn’t a core mechanic (no, not even nine times). It is possible to be killed by the game’s main enemies, these pale beige blobs with glowing yellow eyes that chase the cat as a mob, but otherwise, it’s all about agility and the freedom to explore. Action sequences with the enemies are fast-paced, and the scene Martin-Raget showed off had the cat running and leaping down a long alleyway, the blobs close on its tail.

BlueTwelve Studio

While Stray encourages exploration, the path forward is usually clear, with crates and ledges marked by splotches of yellow and graffiti-style arrows that try to blend into the scenery. Players are able to carry a flashlight and other tools in a small inventory managed by B-12, a cute drone that lives in a backpack the cat picks up along its journey. B-12 has its own backstory, according to Martin-Raget, and it’s the main way the cat interacts with technology and talks to robots. The drone also displays the current objective.

“I don't want to reveal too much about this, but there are a few points in the story where B-12 is a bit more powerful than what I show you now,” Martin-Raget said.

And now some rapid-fire facts about Stray:

• There are no customization options for the cat.

• The cat doesn’t have to eat, drink or sleep to stay alive, but it can do these things because they're cute.

• The cat doesn’t have a name.

• There are no laser-pointer mini games.

Stray exists somewhere between a futuristic survival game and a housecat simulator, with some machine-powered dystopia sprinkled across the entire thing. It’s about discovery and exploration, but mostly, it’s a game about being a cat.

“As you can see, even though all the jumps are successful, I'm still really free to move around anywhere I want to,” Martin-Raget said, the cat strolling by a can on a ledge. He swiped a paw at it and it clattered to the ground. “I have to make that fall because I'm still a cat.”

Stray is due to hit PlayStation 5, PS4 and PC via Steam on July 19th.

Tasks, Google’s standalone to-do app, hasn’t changed much since it was introduced alongside Gmail’s big 2018 redesign. Outside of the Calendar integration that was added in 2020, the software has kept its limited feature set. But it's finally about to get some long-overdue functionality.

Google announced today you can now mark important to-dos with a star, and view and sort those items in a new view. It’s a small addition, to be sure, but one that will make it easier to see all your critical to-dos. “We hope this update makes it easier for you to prioritize your tasks and quickly navigate to important tasks across your projects,” Google said.

If you don’t see the starring functionality right away, Google notes it’s gradually rolling out the feature to all Workspace users, and it may take up to 15 days for some to see it appear.

The resurgence of Ghostbusters is set to continue with a new animated series that's coming to Netflix. Ghostbusters: Afterlife co-writer and director Jason Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan are heading up the show as executive producers. Sony Pictures Animation is involved as well. Other details remain a mystery for now, including the title, the basics of the plot or and when it will be released.

It seems to be early days for the new project, which will be the third animated Ghostbusters series after The Real Ghostbusters and Extreme Ghostbusters. Netflix made the announcement as part of its Geeked Week event. 

Today is also Ghostbusters Day, an annual celebration of the franchise. According to Variety, Reitman and Kenan are expected to announce more projects. A few Ghostbusters games are in the works as well, including Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed and Ghostbusters VR, both of which are set to arrive later this year.

Razer is upgrading its Kishi mobile gaming grip for 2022.

The Razer Kishi V2 is redesigned around a more-solid sliding bridge, which will allow for wider device compatibility compared to the original pad's flexible bridge. The rubber inserts that hold your phone snug can also be removed, which Razer helpfully says will support "some phones with phone cases." Good luck figuring out if that includes yours.

While the main inputs look unchanged, the V2's switches — the things underneath the buttons that actually register that you're pressing them — have also been reworked, swapping out membranes for the microswitches found in Razer's Wolverine console pad. There are also tweaks to the function keys, with a dedicated 'Share' button added at the front and a pair of programmable bumpers situated next to the shoulder triggers.

Razer

The Share button will only work with Razer Nexus, the company's new companion app for Android that it hopes you'll launch your games from. Nexus will also help you discover compatible games, stream your gameplay to YouTube or Facebook, tweak controller settings and program those new bumpers. 

As with the original pad, the Kishi V2 connects over USB-C, avoiding the latency of Bluetooth options. The Android version is available today for $99.99, and an iOS version will hit the market this fall.