Star Wars

Star Wars is an American epic space opera franchise, centered on a film series created by George Lucas. It depicts the adventures of various characters "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".

The first film in the series, Star Wars (later subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope), was released on May 25, 1977 by 20th Century Fox and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon. It was followed by the similarly successful sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983); these three films constitute the original Star Wars trilogy. A prequel trilogy was later released between 1999 and 2005, which received a more mixed reaction from critics and fans, compared to the original trilogy. All seven films were nominated for or won Academy Awards, and were commercial successes, with a combined box office revenue of $4.38 billion, making Star Wars the fourth highest-grossing film series. The series has spawned an extensive media franchise—the Star Wars expanded universe—including books, television series, computer and video games, and comic books, resulting in significant development of the series's fictional universe. Star Wars also holds a Guinness World Records title for the "Most successful film merchandising franchise." In 2012, the total value of the Star Wars franchise was estimated at USD $30.7 billion, including box-office receipts as well as profits from their video games and DVD sales.

Rogue One

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, or simply Rogue One, is an upcoming American epic space opera film directed by Gareth Edwards and written by Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz, from an idea by visual effects supervisor John Knoll. It will be the first film in the Star Wars Anthology series, a collection of stand-alone stories set in the Star Wars universe, and will star Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Riz Ahmed, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, Forest Whitaker, Mads Mikkelsen, and Alan Tudyk. Set shortly before the events of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), the story will center on a group of Rebel spies on a mission to steal the plans for the Empire's new weapon, the Death Star.

The film is produced by Lucasfilm and will be distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Principal photography began at Elstree Studios, near London during early August 2015. Rogue One will be released on December 16, 2016, one year after the franchise's latest film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).

Rook

Rook or rooks may refer to:

Bird

Places

People

Art, entertainment, and media

Comedy

Fictional entities

Games

Literature

Music

A* search algorithm

In computer science, A* (pronounced as "A star" ( listen)) is a computer algorithm that is widely used in pathfinding and graph traversal, the process of plotting an efficiently traversable path between multiple points, called nodes. Noted for its performance and accuracy, it enjoys widespread use. However, in practical travel-routing systems, it is generally outperformed by algorithms which can pre-process the graph to attain better performance, although other work has found A* to be superior to other approaches.

Peter Hart, Nils Nilsson and Bertram Raphael of Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) first described the algorithm in 1968. It is an extension of Edsger Dijkstra's 1959 algorithm. A* achieves better performance by using heuristics to guide its search.

History

In 1968, AI researcher Nils Nilsson was trying to improve the path planning done by Shakey the Robot, a prototype robot that could navigate through a room containing obstacles. This path-finding algorithm, that Nilsson called A1, was a faster version of the then best known method, Dijkstra's algorithm, for finding shortest paths in graphs. Bertram Raphael suggested some significant improvements upon this algorithm, calling the revised version A2. Then Peter E. Hart introduced an argument that established A2, with only minor changes, to be the best possible algorithm for finding shortest paths. Hart, Nilsson and Raphael then jointly developed a proof that the revised A2 algorithm was optimal for finding shortest paths under certain well-defined conditions.

Riz Ahmed

Rizwan "Riz" Ahmed (born 1 December 1982), also known as Riz MC, is a British actor and rapper. He has starred in The Road to Guantanamo, Shifty, Britz, Four Lions, Ill Manors, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Nightcrawler.

Early life

Ahmed was born into a Muslim family in Wembley, London. He is of Pakistani heritage, and has as one of his ancestors Sir Shah Muhammad Sulaiman, "the first Indian judge appointed by the British in Uttar Pradesh" - through him, he's also a descendant of Mulla Mahmud Jaunpuri, one of the foremost Islamic philosopher-scientists produced during the Mughal empire. His parents moved to England from Karachi, Pakistan during the 1970s. He attended Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood through a scholarship programme. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford with a degree in PPE and studied acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Acting career

Television and film

Ahmed's film career began in the Michael Winterbottom film The Road to Guantanamo in which he played the part of Shafiq Rasul, a member of the Tipton Three. He and another actor involved in the film as well as two of the Tipton Three were detained at Luton Airport upon their return from the Berlin Film Festival where the film won a Silver Bear Award. Across his years as an actor he has also featured in various TV roles. He has played Sohail Waheed in the 2007 Channel 4 drama, Britz. 2008 saw him perform as both Riq in the five-part horror thriller for E4, Dead Set and Manesh Kunzru in ITV1's finance fraud drama Wired. In July 2009 in appeared in Freefall alongside Sarah Harding. He featured in the title role of the 2009 independent film Shifty, directed by Eran Creevy. Ahmed plays a charismatic young drug dealer in the film which sees a life in the day of this character. He was nominated for Best Actor at the 2008 British Independent Film Awards for this role, alongside Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.