David Silver is responsible for several eye-catching demonstrations of artificial intelligence in recent years, working on advances that helped revive interest in the field after the last great AI Winter. At DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Silver has led the development of techniques that let computers learn for themselves how to solve problems that once seemed intractable. Most famously, this includes AlphaGo, a program revealed in 2017 that taught itself to play the ancient board game Go to a grandmaster level. Go is too subtle and instinctive to be tamed using conventional programming, but AlphaGo learned to play through practice and positive reward--an AI technique known as "reinforcement learning." In 2018, Silver and colleagues developed a more general version of the program, called AlphaZero, capable of learning to play expert chess and shogi as well as Go.

The hand is made using aviation-level aluminum and plastic. To set it up, amputees are instructed to "think" about moving individual fingers and making hand gestures while the prosthetic is attached. Meanwhile, the device measures and remembers what each signal looks like. It's ready to operate within 15 minutes, the company says. After training, the robotic hand will respond to each of the muscle triggers it picked up during the exercise.

What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. Artificial intelligence has recently beaten world champions in Go and poker and made extraordinary progress in domains such as machine translation, object classification, and speech recognition. However, most AI systems are extremely narrowly focused. AlphaGo, the champion Go player, does not know that the game is played by putting stones onto a board; it has no idea what a "stone" or a "board" is, and would need to be retrained from scratch if you presented it with a rectangular board rather than a square grid.

Researchers are pushing beyond the limitations of convolutional neural networks using geometric deep learning techniques.

Since the release of the highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 video game on Dec. 10, thousands of gamers have created viral videos featuring a multitude of glitches and bugs -- many hilarious -- that mar the game and render it virtually unplayable for many users. So many gamers demanded refunds from distributors last week that they overwhelmed Sony's customer service representatives and even briefly took down one of its corporate sites. In response, Sony and Microsoft said they would offer full refunds to anyone who bought Cyberpunk 2077 through their online stores; Sony even removed the title, Mike Isaac and Kellen Browning report in The New York Times. Cyberpunk's rollout is one of the most visible disasters in the history of video games -- a high-profile flameout during the holiday shopping season by a studio widely considered an industry darling. It shows the pitfalls gaming studios can face when building so-called Triple-A games, titles backed by years of development and hundreds of millions of dollars.

The lockdown boom in video games has put the spotlight on the global success of British game makers, attracting the attention of deep-pocketed US giants looking to snap up valuable pandemic-proof businesses. Electronic Arts, the California-based global gaming giant, announced a surprise £945m bid for Codemasters, the maker of Formula One racing games. EA's offer, which has been recommended by the Codemasters board, is almost £200m more than that tabled last month by its rival Take-Two Interactive, the maker of games including Grand Theft Auto, which is expected to rejoin the bidding war with a sweeter deal. The gaming industry has proved to be a coronavirus winner, with tens of millions of consumers looking for relief from lockdown boredom and Britain's pedigree ensuring excited investors sent stocks soaring. Industry veterans are not surprised by the latest boom, pointing to Britain's history of creating world-class games The handful of UK game developers that are listed on the London stock market, including the Warwickshire-based Codemasters, have all experienced share price surges of more than 100% this year.

Branches of Co-op in the south of England have been using real-time facial recognition cameras to scan shoppers entering stores. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. In total 18 shops from the Southern Co-op franchise have been using the technology in an effort to reduce shoplifting and abuse against staff. As a result of the trials, other regional Co-Op franchises are now believed to be trialing facial recognition systems. Use of facial recognition by police forces has been controversial, with the Court of Appeal ruling parts of its use to be unlawful earlier this year.

Fans of the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast will be able to listen without lifting a finger – and not just because the TV's been tuned to BBC One since The Gruffalo at 8.55am. Alexa users will be able to summon Her Majesty into their living rooms from 3pm GMT with the words "Alexa, play the Queen's Christmas Day message". The privilege isn't reserved just for Brits. Anyone with their Amazon Echo set to English – be that British, American, Australian, Canadian or Indian – will be able to listen to the speech, Amazon has announced. "After a challenging year, millions of people from across the Commonwealth will be eagerly awaiting Her Majesty the Queen's message on Christmas Day," said Eric King, the director of Alexa Europe.

On Wednesday, members of the company's prominent Ethical AI research team wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking that ousted researcher Timnit Gebru be rehired. On Wednesday, members of the company's prominent Ethical AI research team wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking that ousted researcher Timnit Gebru be rehired. Members of a prestigious research unit at Google have sent a letter to the company's chief executive demanding that ousted artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru be reinstated. Gebru, who studies the ethics of AI and was one of the only Black research scientists at Google, says she was unexpectedly fired after a dispute over an academic paper and months of speaking out about the need for more women and people of color at the tech giant. In a letter sent on Wednesday by members of Google's Ethical AI team to CEO Sundar Pichai, Gebru's former colleagues ask that she be re-hired and promoted, among a host of other demands, according to a copy of the note obtained by NPR that was first reported by Bloomberg.

The report referenced an "interoperability test [in which] Huawei and Megvii jointly provided a face-recognition solution based on Huawei's video cloud solution. In the solution, Huawei provided servers, storage, network equipment, its FusionSphere cloud platform, cameras and other software and hardware, [while] Megvii provided its dynamic facial-recognition system software".