The Great Pyramid of Giza has been shrouded in mystery for millennia, but now a long-held secret of its structure might be known thanks to particle physics. A narrow void lying deep within the ancient Wonder of the World has been found by scientists using cosmic-ray based imaging. The internal structure is located above the Grand Gallery - which links two of the Pyramid's chambers - and traces a similar route for at least 30 metres (100ft). While the precise design and purpose of the void is unknown, it has been hailed by the team of academics as the biggest discovery inside the Giza landmark since the 19th century. The Great Pyramid of Giza has been shrouded in mystery for millennia, but now a long-held secret of its structure might be known thanks to particle physics.

ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland's defense ministry has admitted sending staff to test reconnaissance drones in contested land held by Israel - an embarrassing blow for the neutral European country's status as an honest broker in the Middle East.

Mountari said the team of 12 U.S. Special Forces soldiers and 30 Nigerian troops had been "right up to the Mali border and had neutralized some bandits" just before the ambush took place. He declined to give further details. The U.S. military has been adamant that the Oct. 3-4 mission was not intended to involve contact with enemy forces. Mountari said: "They (U.S.-Nigerien contingent) came back to Niger, they greeted the population, they gathered intelligence and it was inside the country, when they didn't expect anything, that the attack happened."

Parallel best-first search algorithms such as Hash Distributed A* (HDA*) distribute work among the processes using a global hash function. We analyze the search and communication overheads of state-of-the-art hash-based parallel best-first search algorithms, and show that although Zobrist hashing, the standard hash function used by HDA*, achieves good load balance for many domains, it incurs significant communication overhead since almost all generated nodes are transferred to a different processor than their parents. We propose Abstract Zobrist hashing, a new work distribution method for parallel search which, instead of computing a hash value based on the raw features of a state, uses a feature projection function to generate a set of abstract features which results in a higher locality, resulting in reduced communications overhead. We show that Abstract Zobrist hashing outperforms previous methods on search domains using hand-coded, domain specific feature projection functions. We then propose GRAZHDA*, a graph-partitioning based approach to automatically generating feature projection functions. GRAZHDA* seeks to approximate the partitioning of the actual search space graph by partitioning the domain transition graph, an abstraction of the state space graph. We show that GRAZHDA* outperforms previous methods on domain-independent planning.

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and its variants demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in the class of generative models. To capture higher dimensional distributions, the common learning procedure requires high computational complexity and large number of parameters. In this paper, we present a new generative adversarial framework by representing each layer as a tensor structure connected by multilinear operations, aiming to reduce the number of model parameters by a large factor while preserving the quality of generalized performance. To learn the model, we develop an efficient algorithm by alternating optimization of the mode connections. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can achieve high compression rate for model parameters up to 40 times as compared to the existing GAN.

Cointelegraph talks with AI visionary Ben Goertzel, who shares with us his vision of the future of AI and computing, while also offering insights on how to guide an "artificial general intelligence" toward good, rather than evil. The author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, Goertzel is chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation, Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity, founder and CEO of SingularityNet, and chief scientist at Hanson Robotics. He has been working for years, along with a team of dozens researchers scattered around the globe, to create the world's first AI marketplace powered by Blockchain technologies. BG: I began my career as a mathematics Ph.D. in the 1980s. I was an academic for awhile, then I entered industry in the late 90's and I've been doing artificial intelligence applications in sort of every industry you can imagine from genetics, bioinformatics, and natural language processing.

Last month, I published an article on Nautilus called "Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?". It was a meditation on a series of computer experiments in the study of Prisoner's Dilemma, and a reflection on what these simulations, and more complex arguments from mathematical logic, might tell us about social life. The groups that formed in our simulation, shibboleth machines, were unable to tolerate others--and eventually became unable to tolerate the differences that emerged amongst themselves. There were some lovely comments on Nautilus and elsewhere, of course, and the usual rough-and-tumble of Internet argument. What I didn't expect was the robust defense of tribalism made by educated and apparently intelligent people writing on ostensibly science- and technology-focused sites.

As America increases its military footprint in some of Africa's most dangerous trouble spots, confronting extremist affiliates of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, the risk of intelligence failures and more combat deaths is mounting. U.S. special forces who accompanied Niger's military at a meeting of village leaders in Tongo Tongo on Oct. 4 were working in the country's treacherous western borderlands, a region of shifting tribal allegiances, opaque motives and ethnic grudges going back decades, all feeding into a growing jihadist problem. Four Americans and five Nigerian troops died after leaving Tongo Tongo and being ambushed and heavily outgunned by fighters armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The militants are believed to be from a Malian-led militia, the Islamic State in the Greater Sahel, which declared allegiance to the overall militant organization in 2015. One error appears to have been downplaying the danger.

With messaging apps on the rise, chatbots are all the hype now. Chatbots are artificial intelligence systems that interact with users via messaging, text, or speech. Many are deployed on chatbot platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Slack, or text messages. Facebook's expansion with Facebook Messenger has been giving businesses the opportunity to better reach their target audience through different APIs, and chatbots are becoming a necessity in certain industries. Despite the complexity of artificial intelligence used to pick content and context from conversations with users, there are a number of platforms and frameworks available to build a sophisticated chatbot.

The U.S. has stepped up its military involvement in the Horn of Africa nation since President Donald Trump approved expanded military operations against the group early this year. The U.S. has carried out at least 19 drone strikes in Somalia since January, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which tracks U.S. drone strikes in a number of countries.