Geoffrey Hinton was in high school when a friend convinced him that the brain worked like a hologram. To create one of those 3-D holographic images, you record how countless beams of light bounce off an object and then you store these little bits of information across a vast database. While still in high school, back in 1960s Britain, Hinton was fascinated by the idea that the brain stores memories in much the same way. Rather than keeping them in a single location, it spreads them across its enormous network of neurons. This may seem like a small revelation, but it was a key moment for Hinton -- "I got very excited about that idea," he remembers.

Chinese search giant Baidu has served up its first ever visual search engine, which allows users to finally query the web using only images as input instead of keywords. Google has long offered this sort of thing, but Baidu continues to show that it's determined to keep pace with Larry Page and company. "We didn't have any similar kind of product in China because we didn't have the sufficient technology to handle this," says Baidu's Kai Yu, who led the project. "In the China market, this is the first of its kind." Unveiled last week, the tool grew out of Baidu's newly launched Institute of Deep Learning, the company's Beijing- and Silicon Valley-based research arm focused on deep learning, a field of computer science that seeks to mimic how the human brain works. The company has already deployed deep-learning algorithms for optical character, face, and voice recognition, online advertising and web search.

There's a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm. The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is -- at its core -- a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks. About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. "For the first time in my life," Ng says, "it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime."

If you've been to the RoboGames, you've seen everything from flame-throwing battlebots to androids that play soccer. But robo-athletes are more than just performers. Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball -- or something like it. The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take swings at flying plastic balls, and though it may miss at first, it can learn with each new pitch and adjust its swing accordingly. Eventually, it will make contact. The robot, you see, is also equipped with an artificial brain.

The brick office building sits next to a strip mall in Cupertino, California, about an hour south of San Francisco, and if you walk inside, you'll find a California state flag and a cardboard cutout of R2-D2 and plenty of Christmas decorations -- even though we're well into April. But there are big plans for this building. It's where Baidu -- "the Google of China" -- hopes to create the future. In late January, word arrived that the Chinese search giant was setting up a research lab dedicated to "deep learning" -- an emerging computer science field that seeks to mimic the human brain with hardware and software -- and as it turns out, this lab includes an operation here in Silicon Valley, not far from Apple headquarters, in addition to a facility back in China. The company just hired its first researcher in Cupertino, with plans to bring in several more by the end of the year.

When Google built the latest version of its Android mobile operating system, the web giant made some big changes to the way the OS interprets your voice commands. It installed a voice recognition system based on what's called a neural network -- a computerized learning system that behaves much like the human brain. For many users, says Vincent Vanhoucke, a Google research scientist who helped steer the effort, the results were dramatic. "It kind of came as a surprise that we could do so much better by just changing the model," he says. Vanhoucke says that the voice error rate with the new version of Android -- known as Jelly Bean -- is about 25 percent lower than previous versions of the software, and that this is making people more comfortable with voice commands.

A renewed international effort is gearing up to design computers and software that smash language barriers and create a borderless global marketplace. A woman sits at a desk in Manhattan, talking to herself in French. The phrases she balances on each breath are musical to American ears. She has postcards of Montreal tacked up on the walls of her cubicle – pastel-painted houses in the snow – so as she sculpts the contours of each syllable, she can remind herself of the place where the sounds she's making are heard every day in the street. Her name is Guylaine Laperrière, and she came to New York City more than a decade ago to study musical theater. One day, a friend asked her if she wanted to make a little cash dubbing a French voice-over for a promotional short about insurance. She took the job, and was surprised how much she enjoyed bringing ideas from one language home into another. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links.

Compiled by Carl Zimmer (zimmer@panix.com) Natural Language Laboratory, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia Researchers are devising "relaxed grammars" to extract the sense of transcribed speech through a method known as "partial parsing," which deciphers chunks of language rather than breaking down the structure of entire sentences. Their work is being integrated into closed-captioning technology for real-time TV translations. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue.

As the US war machine develops a digital air force of "unmanned aerial vehicles," it's only a matter of time before fighter planes without fighter jocks joust in some robot dogfight in the sky. "Tumbleweeds cleared" reads the sign by the side of the road, a fair indication of the nature of local enterprise. This is the desert east of Palmdale, California, center of the US high-tech aerospace industry. To the north is Edwards Air Force Base and nearby, Air Force Plant 42, where Northrop hatched the B-2 bomber. A few hundred yards away is Lockheed Skunk Works, birthplace of the F-117 stealth fighter. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. But now I'm driving past old ranches with corrals jury-rigged from wire and discarded doors, beneath a sky as wide as the plain, looking for a very different kind of airplane.

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. The outcome is a halt in federal funding for machine translation R&D. Darpa launches its Spoken Language Systems (SLS) program to develop apps for voice-activated human-machine interaction. Researchers focus on portable systems for face-to-face English-language business negotiations in German and Japanese.