Poet + AI = Apollo ex Machina: Meet the Winners
The time has come to announce the winners of Apollo ex Machina, Bulgaria's first (and one of the world's first) competition for poetry created with the help of artificial intelligence. The jury's picks were revealed at a ceremony in the Sofia City Library, where the anthology of selected entries, published by Scribens, was also presented. In a moment you can read the best poems and judge for yourself how good they are.
02Tetris: The Human Who Never Stops Outdoing Himself
“I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my hands…” Blue Scuti mutters, before he realizes he has fulfilled a dream that seemed impossible. Almost four decades on, he has beaten, one way or another, the game we have all played. Sitting in front of a retro cathode-ray-tube TV, found after countless difficulties, clicking the buttons of a retro controller for 42 minutes straight at more than 20 taps per second… the teenager reminded us that there is no limit to what a human can do. But how can you beat a game that has no end? And why are this success and the road to it such important news for humans as a species? News about our ability, through cooperation and talent, to keep moving forward… To create, to make things, to find meaning. To give birth to stories. Tetris is a legend that passes through the generations to give birth to new legends. A week ago we took a stroll through the history of the game that came out of a Soviet laboratory during the Cold War. Today we will look at a brand-new record that has so much to tell us about ourselves.
