There was sad news last week for enthusiasts of the Aibo Entertainment Robot from Sony: the doglike machine, which walks, barks and recognizes speech, is being put to sleep, the company said. The Aibo, which was introduced in 1999, is being discontinued as part of Sony's move to improve its financial position. Last September the company announced that it would eliminate or scale back 15 product categories. In addition to Aibo, Sony has also stopped selling its Qualia line of high-end televisions and audio equipment, plasma TV's and car stereos in Japan, said Rick Clancy, a senior vice president at Sony Electronics. With little marketing or promotion, the Aibo robot garnered a cultlike following around the world.

Though most of the truly futuristic projects are probably years from the commercial market, scientists say that after a lull, artificial intelligence has rapidly grown far more sophisticated. Today some scientists are beginning to use the term cognitive computing, to distinguish their research from an earlier generation of artificial intelligence work. What sets the new researchers apart is a wealth of new biological data on how the human brain functions. "There's definitely been a palpable upswing in methods, competence and boldness," said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. "At conferences you are hearing the phrase'human-level A.I.,' and people are saying that without blushing."

Donald Michie, a versatile British scientist and early theorist of artificial intelligence who helped develop a "smart" industrial robot and then applied the technology to diverse fields, died on July 7 in Britain. Dr. Michie (pronounced MICK-ee) died in a car accident near London along with his former wife, Anne McLaren, a biologist and pioneering researcher in the field of reproduction. In the early 1970s, in work that received international attention and helped make Britain a force in advancing artificial intelligence, Dr. Michie led a team that produced "Freddy," a computer-directed robotic arm that could choose and assemble parts from a jumbled and potentially confusing array. To demonstrate Freddy's capabilities, Dr. Michie programmed the machine to put together the parts of a toy truck. Nils J. Nilsson, an emeritus professor of engineering at Stanford University and a former chairman of the department of computer science there, said the machine was "ahead of its time" and impressed researchers at Stanford and elsewhere as "one of the first automatic assembly systems in the world."

Dr. Anne Foerst, 34, a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of M.I.T.'s God and Computers project, apologized on a recent afternoon that a certain robot named Kismet wouldn't be joining our interview. ''Cynthia Breazeal, who built Kismet, is away in Japan right now and there's no getting her going,'' Dr. Foerst said in her German accent, ''but you'd love her. At the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, engineers are trying to build robots with social skills and humanlike experiences, and so, as an experiment, they've created creatures that they think humans will relate to. Dr. Foerst, a Lutheran minister who supported herself by repairing computers during eight years of higher education in Germany, serves as theological adviser to the scientists building Kismet and the robot's brother, Cog. What exactly do people do here at this laboratory? A. We are trying to build robots that are social and embodied.

IT SOUNDS like every general's dream: technology that allows a nation to fight a war with little or no loss of life on its side. It is also a peace-seeking citizen's nightmare. Without the politically embarrassing threat of soldiers returning home in flag-wrapped coffins, governments would find it far easier to commit to military action. The consequences for countries on the receiving end – and for world peace – would be immense. This is not a fantasy scenario.

"Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it's clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn't really philosophical to begin with." "The chance of the quantum theoretician is not the ethical freedom of the Augustinian." "There's something queer about describing consciousness: whatever people mean to say, they just can't seem to make it clear. It's not like feeling confused or ignorant. Instead, we feel we know what's going on but can't describe it properly. How could anything seem so close, yet always keep beyond our reach?" How can mind arise from nonmind? In examining human thought through the ages, philosophers appear to have gone down one of two paths. One school of thought, which we might call mind as machine, starts with the observation that human thought takes place in the human brain. The brain, in turn, is made up of tens to hundreds of billions of neurons. Neurons, while not simple structures, can nonetheless be fully understood as biochemical machines. Our brain thus consists of billions of biochemical machines interacting with each other, a fact from which we can draw two conclusions.

This is an updated version of Usability Issues in Description Logic Systems'' published in Proceedings of International Workshop on Description Logics, Gif sur Yvette, (Paris), France, September, 1997.

In 1955 the computer scientist John McCarthy, who has died aged 84, coined the term artificial intelligence, or AI. His pioneering work in AI – which he defined as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" – included organising the first Dartmouth conference on artificial intelligence, and developing the programming language Lisp in 1958. This was the second high-level language, after Fortran, and was based on the radical idea of computing using symbolic expressions rather than numbers. It helped spawn a whole AI industry. McCarthy was also the first to propose a time-sharing model of computing.

The American scientist Joshua Lederberg, who has died aged 82, won the 1958 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for showing that bacteria can conjugate and exchange small strips of genetic material. Among the consequences of this was the realisation that antibiotic resistance can be passed around between bacteria, rather than emerging from selective breeding of resistant strains. This opened new paths in genetic research. He went on to a distinguished career in science policy, advising government committees and presidents, heading Rockefeller University and writing a Washington Post column on science and society. Lederberg's father was an orthodox rabbi - the family had come to New York from Palestine - who wanted Joshua to follow in his footsteps.

Originating as a BBC radio series in 1978, Douglas Adams's inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon. Douglas wrote five parts from 1979 onwards (the first sold 250,000 in three months), introducing the world to Marvin the Paranoid Android, the computer Deep Thought, space guitarist Hotblack Desiato (named after Adams's local estate agent) and the Guide itself, a remarkably prescient forerunner to the internet. Aldiss's first novel is a tour-de-force of adventure, wonder and conceptual breakthrough. Set aboard a vast generation starship millennia after blast-off, the novel follows Roy Complain on a voyage of discovery from ignorance of his surroundings to some understanding of his small place in the universe. Complain is spiteful and small-minded but grows in humanity as his trek through the ship brings him into contact with giant humans, mutated rats and, ultimately, a wondrous view of space beyond the ship. One of the first attempts to write a comprehensive "future history", the trilogy - which also includes Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953) - is Asimov's version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, set on a galactic scale. Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory with which to combat the fall into barbarianism of the Human Empire, and sets up the Foundation to foster art, science and technology.