Are we humans – with our carbon-based neural net “wetware” brains – at a point in history when we might be able to imprint the circuitry of the human brain using transistors on a silicon chip?

A well-covered recent article in MIT's Technology Review reports that a team of European scientists may have taken the first steps in creating a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain.

This competition is about learning, or otherwise developing, the best controller (agent) for a version of Super Mario Bros.

The controller's job is to win as many levels (of increasing difficulty) as possible. Each time step (24 per second in simualated time) the controller has to decide what action to take (left, right, jump etc) in response to the environment around Mario.

Current handcrafted approaches to compiler development are no longer sustainable. With each generation of re-configurable architecture, the compiler development time increases and the performance improvement achieved decreases. As high performance embedded systems move from application specific ASICs to programmable heterogeneous processors, this problem is becoming critical.

This project explores an emerging alternative approach where we use machine-learning techniques, developed in the artificial intelligence arena, to learn how to generate compilers automatically.

These are short samples of the music generated by the program Randomusic, written by Magnus Andersson.

A lot of people have been curious about how the AI in AI War: Fleet Command works, since we have been able to achieve so much more realistic strategic/tactical results compared to the AI in most RTS games. Part 1 of this series will give an overview of the design philosophy we used, and later parts will delve more deeply into specific sub-topics.

For decades, humans have struggled to create machines that can extract meaning from human language, with all its messiness, subtle context, humor, and irony. Traditional approaches require a great deal of manual work up front to render material understandable to computer algorithms. The ultimate goal is to make this step unnecessary.

IBM hopes to advance toward this objective with Watson, a computer system that will play Jeopardy!, the popular TV trivia game show, against human contestants. Demonstrations of the system are expected this year, with a final televised matchup--complete with hosting by the show's Alex Trebek--sometime next year. Questions will be spoken aloud by Trebek but fed into the machine in text format during the show.

Kurzweil’s successes at technological and social forecasting are highlighted (he correctly predicted the rise of the Internet, the fall of the Soviet Union, the year that a computer would defeat a human champion at chess, and the list goes on and on), and the Singularity – which he forecasts for 2045 – is presented as his latest and greatest prediction, resulting from a painstaking process of data analysis covering technology trends in computer technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI and other areas.

A science-savvy robot called Adam has successfully developed and tested its first scientific hypothesis, all without human intervention. This hints at a future where robots could spare lab assistants and post-docs some of the drudgery of research.

The most under-appreciated search engine on the Internet.

Simulating even primitive intelligence is extremely demanding, so how does a basic PC go about simulating human intelligence in multiple game characters at once?