Worms?

Worms? is a 1983 computer game written by David Maynard for Electronic Arts, released for the Atari 800 and Commodore 64. It was one of the original five games that launched the company. More a software toy than a game, Worms? is an interactive version of Paterson's Worms.

The game is abstract, like Conway's Game of Life, but the player's ostensible goal is to optimally program one or more "worms" (each a sort of cellular automaton) to grow and survive as long as possible. The game area is divided up into hexagonal cells, and the worms are essentially programmed to move in a particular direction for each combination of filled-in and empty frame segments in their immediate vicinity. Over the course of a game, the player needs to give his/her worm less and less input, and more and more moves by their worm result in the encountering of familiar situation for which the worm has already been 'trained'. As the worms move, they generate aleatoric music.

Reception

Orson Scott Card in Compute! in 1983 gave Worms? and two other EA games, M.U.L.E. and Archon: The Light and the Dark, complimentary reviews, writing that "they are original; they do what they set out to do very, very well; they allow the player to take part in the creativity; they do things that only computers can do".Compute!'s Gazette's reviewer called Worms? for the Commodore 64 "one of the most fascinating games I've played in a long time. It's so different from anything else that it quickly captivated me. Worms? tournaments become popular among the staff of Compute! ... [It] is as much fun to watch as it is to play". He added that part of its appeal was that "The game is hard to master. It's easy to play, but seems almost impossible to play well time after time".Compute! listed the game in May 1988 as one of "Our Favorite Games", writing that four years after its introduction "Worms? is still in a class by itself", requiring "a sense of strategy as well as proficiency at joystick maneuvers".

Worm (Kamen Rider)

Worms (ワーム, Wāmu) are the villains in the Japanese tokusatsu series Kamen Rider Kabuto. They are an alien life form that came from a meteor destroying the city district of Shibuya seven years prior to the series' timeline. However, the Worms known as Natives existed prior to the coming of the Shibuya Meteorite, through another meteorite that came 35 years ago. In the movie, a third meteor nearly hit the Earth, though thanks to Kabuto it was adverted and history was altered. This implies that meteors containing Worms are insolated and there are others.

The Worms were designed by Yasushi Nirasawa (韮沢 靖, Nirasawa Yasushi), who also designed the Undead for Kamen Rider Blade, the Horrors in GARO and later created the Imagin for Kamen Rider Den-O. These designs were later detailed in Worm Works: GITAI (ワームワークスGITAI, Wāmu Wākusu GITAI).

Shibuya Meteorite

A mysterious meteorite that crashed into Shibuya seven years ago. This meteorite brought along the extraterrestrial creatures known as Worms. During episode 41, Riku Kagami explains that another meteorite carrying the Natives had arrived on Earth thirty-five years before this, explaining why fragments of the meteorite similar to those of the Shibuya Meteorite existed so long ago. The Natives that arrived on Earth worked with humans to create the Masked Rider System in order to fend off the threat of other Worms that would arrive later. In the movie, which acts as a prequel to the series, it is revealed this meteor was actually far larger and would've vaporized Earth's oceans and released many more Worms until Hyper Kabuto went back in time with the meteor and caused it to slam into the Shibuya meteor, resulting in only a small fragment of it landing in Shibuya.

Worms (2007 video game)

Worms is an artillery strategy game developed by Team17. It is available on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and iOS platforms and is one of the many installments of the Worms series created by Team17. The game was known as Worms HD during development, but Microsoft renamed it to just Worms.

Gameplay

Players control a small platoon of worms across a deformable landscape, battling computer or player controlled teams. The game features bright and humorous cartoon-style animation and a varied arsenal of weapons. Full voice communication is also available among the players of the game. The game includes a tutorial, single-player challenges, and competitive multiplayer for up to four teams either online or offline.

Development

The development and release of the Xbox Live Arcade version of Worms was significantly delayed due to a disagreement during the certification process prior to release, over the requirement of an in-game means of providing opposing player feedback in post-game lobbies. This delay in the certification process was a source of a frustration for everyone involved. Downloadable content released in May and July 2007 included new costumes, voices, and environments for the games. The game has since taken on the moniker, Worms (2007). Its first official public demonstration was on the showroom floor of the 2007, Consumer Electronics Show.

Factor

Factor, a Latin word meaning "who/which acts", may refer to:

Commerce

Science and technology

Biology

Computer science and information technology

Factoring (finance)

Factoring is a financial transaction and a type of debtor finance in which a business sells its accounts receivable (i.e., invoices) to a third party (called a factor) at a discount. A business will sometimes factor its receivable assets to meet its present and immediate cash needs.Forfaiting is a factoring arrangement used in international trade finance by exporters who wish to sell their receivables to a forfaiter. Factoring is commonly referred to as accounts receivable factoring, invoice factoring, and sometimes accounts receivable financing. Accounts receivable financing is a term more accurately used to describe a form of asset based lending against accounts receivable.

Factoring is not the same as invoice discounting (which is called an "Assignment of Accounts Receivable" in American accounting – as propagated by FASB within GAAP). Factoring is the sale of receivables, whereas invoice discounting ("assignment of accounts receivable" in American accounting) is a borrowing that involves the use of the accounts receivable assets as collateral for the loan. However, in some other markets, such as the UK, invoice discounting is considered to be a form of factoring, involving the "assignment of receivables", that is included in official factoring statistics. It is therefore also not considered to be borrowing in the UK. In the UK the arrangement is usually confidential in that the debtor is not notified of the assignment of the receivable and the seller of the receivable collects the debt on behalf of the factor. In the UK, the main difference between factoring and invoice discounting is confidentiality.

Von Neumann algebra

In mathematics, a von Neumann algebra or W*-algebra is a *-algebra of bounded operators on a Hilbert space that is closed in the weak operator topology and contains the identity operator. They were originally introduced by John von Neumann, motivated by his study of single operators, group representations, ergodic theory and quantum mechanics. His double commutant theorem shows that the analytic definition is equivalent to a purely algebraic definition as an algebra of symmetries.

Two basic examples of von Neumann algebras are as follows. The ring L^∞(R) of essentially bounded measurable functions on the real line is a commutative von Neumann algebra, which acts by pointwise multiplication on the Hilbert space L²(R) of square integrable functions. The algebra B(H) of all bounded operators on a Hilbert space H is a von Neumann algebra, non-commutative if the Hilbert space has dimension at least 2.

Von Neumann algebras were first studied by von Neumann (1930) in 1929; he and Francis Murray developed the basic theory, under the original name of rings of operators, in a series of papers written in the 1930s and 1940s (F.J. Murray & J. von Neumann 1936, 1937, 1943; J. von Neumann 1938, 1940, 1943, 1949), reprinted in the collected works of von Neumann (1961).