Bastard!!

Bastard!!: Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy (BASTARD!!-暗黒の破壊神-, Basutādo!! Ankoku no Hakaishin, lit. "Bastard!! The Destructive God of Darkness") is a manga by Kazushi Hagiwara. It first appeared in Weekly Shōnen Jump, in 1988, and continues to be published irregularly today in Ultra Jump. Currently, it spans 27 volumes.

Kazushi Hagiwara is an enthusiastic fan of heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons, using ideas from both of these in the Bastard!! story. Many characters and places in the story, for instance, are named after members of Hagiwara's favorite bands. Hagiwara also attributes the manga Devilman by Go Nagai as a primary influence on his artwork.

The manga is published in English by Viz Media. Only volumes 1–19 have been translated, with no plans to release the rest. Additionally, a six-part anime OVA was released in 1992. The OVA was released in North America by Pioneer in 1995. Bastard!! is one of Weekly Shōnen Jump's best-selling manga series of all time, with over 30 million copies sold by 2008.

Bastard

Bastard may refer to

Film

Literature

Music

Albums

Songs

Bastard (Subway to Sally album)

Bastard is the ninth album by the Medieval Metal band Subway to Sally.

Track listing

Personnel

SSS

SSS may refer to:

Places

Businesses and organizations

Schools

In computing

SteadyShot

SteadyShot is the trademarked name of the integrated image stabilisation technologies used in Sony video camcorders, DSLR cameras and on Sony Xperia smartphones and tablets. Different versions of these technologies are known as Super SteadyShot (SSS), SteadyShot INSIDE (SSI) and Optical SteadyShot (OSS) in Sonys Cyber-shot and Alpha product families.

Design

When a camera is operated hand-held, the operator's shaky hands cause instabilities in the captured image stream. SteadyShot technology works inside the body of the camera. It uses motion sensors to detect the user's movements. SteadyShot then compensates for some of these movements, in some versions by moving the optics and in some versions by moving the image sensor in an opposite direction to the movement.

This approach is contrasted to digital image stabilization in which the physical image is allowed to "track" the scene on the CCD by software to produce a stable image. The digital technique requires the pixel count to be increased to allow the image to move on the sensor while keeping reference points within the boundaries of the capture chip.

SSS*

SSS* is a search algorithm, introduced by George Stockman in 1979, that conducts a state space search traversing a game tree in a best-first fashion similar to that of the A* search algorithm.

SSS* is based on the notion of solution trees. Informally, a solution tree can be formed from any arbitrary game tree by pruning the number of branches at each MAX node to one. Such a tree represents a complete strategy for MAX, since it specifies exactly one MAX action for every possible sequence of moves might be made by the opponent. Given a game tree, SSS* searches through the space of partial solution trees, gradually analyzing larger and larger subtrees, eventually producing a single solution tree with the same root and Minimax value as the original game tree. SSS* never examines a node that alpha-beta pruning would prune, and may prune some branches that alpha-beta would not. Stockman speculated that SSS* may therefore be a better general algorithm than alpha-beta. However, Igor Roizen and Judea Pearl have shown that the savings in the number of positions that SSS* evaluates relative to alpha/beta is limited and generally not enough to compensate for the increase in other resources (e.g., the storing and sorting of a list of nodes made necessary by the best-first nature of the algorithm). However, Aske Plaat, Jonathan Schaeffer, Wim Pijls and Arie de Bruin have shown that a sequence of null-window alpha-beta calls is equivalent to SSS* (i.e., it expands the same nodes in the same order) when alpha-beta is used with a transposition table, as is the case in all game-playing programs for chess, checkers, etc. Now the storing and sorting of the OPEN list were no longer necessary. This allowed the implementation of (an algorithm equivalent to) SSS* in tournament quality game-playing programs. Experiments showed that it did indeed perform better than Alpha-Beta in practice, but that it did not beat NegaScout.

Odor

An odor or odour or fragrance is caused by one or more volatilized chemical compounds, generally at a very low concentration, that humans or other animals perceive by the sense of olfaction. Odors are also commonly called scents, which can refer to both pleasant and unpleasant odors. The terms fragrance and aroma are used primarily by the food and cosmetic industry to describe a pleasant odor, and are sometimes used to refer to perfumes. In contrast, malodor, stench, reek, and stink are used specifically to describe unpleasant odor. The term smell (in its noun form) is used for both pleasant and unpleasant odors.

In the United Kingdom, odour refers to scents in general. In the United States and for many non-native English speakers around the world, odor generally has a negative connotation, as a synonym for stink; on the other hand, scent or aroma are used by those people to indicate "pleasant smells".

Basics

The sense of smell gives rise to the perception of odors, mediated by the olfactory nerve. The olfactory receptor (OR) cells are neurons present in the olfactory epithelium, a small patch of tissue in back of the nasal cavity. There are millions of olfactory receptor neurons that act as sensory signaling cells. Each neuron has cilia in direct contact with air. The olfactory nerve is considered the smell mediator, the axon connects the brain to the external air. Odorous molecules act as a chemical stimulus. Molecules bind to receptor proteins extended from cilia, initiating an electric signal.