The Age of Dwindling American Empire: Soldiers, Gaming, and Affective Labor in Warzones

This essay examines the global logics of neoliberalism, and the biopolitical and affective modes of experience that neoliberalism generates. American soldiers, playing games and fighting wars, are living embodiments of the Military Industrial Media Entertainment Network, where boundaries are blurred, information flow is rapid, and cyber imagery prevails. But this is not merely a postmodern space of hybridity; neoliberalism is a biased, so-called laissez-faire re-organization of material and capital flows, designed to glorify the capacities of the market to rule space, consumption, and government without any regard for democratic citizenship. Playing with virtual fields of violence literally as they execute the violent technologies of war, to advance the neoliberal projects of American neoconservative ideologues, soldiers claim that these combat games help them to escape the emotional trials of war. These gamers and their games teach us that neoliberalism is more than privatization of capital, but that it is a way of organizing experience through habits of bodily movement and affect.

A list of tri-state cellular automata which are potential pseudo-random number generators

This paper explores [Formula: see text]-neighborhood [Formula: see text]-state cellular automata (CAs) to find a list of potential pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs). As the rule-space is huge ([Formula: see text]), we have taken two greedy strategies to select the initial set of rules. These CAs are analyzed theoretically and empirically to find the CAs with consistently good randomness properties. Finally, we have listed [Formula: see text] good CAs which qualify as potential PRNGs.

Cellular automata-based approach for digital image scrambling

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate two-dimensional outer totalistic cellular automata (2D-OTCA) rules other than the Game of Life rule for image scrambling. This paper presents a digital image scrambling (DIS) technique based on 2D-OTCA for improving the scrambling degree. The comparison of scrambling performance and computational effort of proposed technique with existing CA-based image scrambling techniques is also presented. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, a DIS technique based on 2D-OTCA with von Neumann neighborhood (NvN) is proposed. Effect of three important cellular automata (CA) parameters on gray difference degree (GDD) is analyzed: first the OTCA rules, afterwards two different boundary conditions and finally the number of CA generations (k) are tested. The authors selected a random sample of gray-scale images from the Berkeley Segmentation Data set and Benchmark, BSDS300 (www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/bsds/) for the experiments. Initially, the CA is setup with a random initial configuration and the GDD is computed by testing all OTCA rules, one by one, for CA generations ranging from 1 to 10. A subset of these tested rules produces high GDD values and shows positive correlation with the k values. Subsequently, this sample of rules is used with different boundary conditions and applied to the sample image data set to analyze the effect of these boundary conditions on GDD. Finally, in order to compare the scrambling performance of the proposed technique with the existing CA-based image scrambling techniques, the authors use same initial CA configuration, number of CA generations, k=10, periodic boundary conditions and the same test images. Findings The experimental results are evaluated and analyzed using GDD parameter and then compared with existing techniques. The technique results in better GDD values with 2D-OTCA rule 171 when compared with existing techniques. The CPU running time of the proposed algorithm is also considerably small as compared to existing techniques. Originality/value In this paper, the authors focused on using von Neumann neighborhood (NvN) to evolve the CA for image scrambling. The use of NvN reduced the computational effort on one hand, and reduced the CA rule space to 1,024 as compared to about 2.62 lakh rule space available with Moore neighborhood (NM) on the other. The results of this paper are based on original analysis of the proposed work.