They said it couldn't be done, but Google's AI technology has proved them wrong by mastering the ancient Chinese game of Go roughly a decade earlier than anyone expected. Tapping neural networks and advanced "tree search" programs, researchers from Google DeepMind created a system called AlphaGo that takes a different approach to the game than had been tried before. In Go, the player's objective is to surround the opponent's pieces by alternately placing black and white pieces on a 19-by-19-line grid while simultaneously avoiding having one's own pieces surrounded. With more possible positions than there are atoms in the universe, Go has long been considered an ultimate challenge for artificial intelligence researchers. Traditional AI efforts to master Go have focused on using search trees, a computer science technique used for locating specific values from within a set. AlphaGo, on the other hand, uses the more advanced Monte Carlo tree search approach often used in game playing.

It's already sorting your email and translating your voice searches, and machine learning will play a bigger role in Google's services moving forward. Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported its quarterly financial results Thursday, with revenue and profit both up from a year earlier. New Google CEO Sundar Pichai took part in his first earnings call, and in between discussing the numbers he revealed how important Google thinks machine learning is to its future. "Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we're rethinking everything we're doing," he said. He was putting the spotlight on a branch of artificial intelligence that's getting more attention lately.

I have seen the future, and it is a world of unparalleled convenience, untold marketing opportunities, and zero privacy. IBM held an event in San Francisco Thursday to show off new capabilities in Watson, it's artificial intelligence system that's being made available to developers to let them build smarter, "cognitive" applications. To set the futuristic tone, IBM invited Peter Diamandis, founder of the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, which humbly describes itself as "a catalyst for the benefit of humanity." To give you an idea of Diamandis' interests, he said he is currently "prospecting" asteroids that he plans to mine for resources. He put the value of one asteroid at $5.4 trillion.

In another sign that more warehouse workers could be displaced by machines, Hitachi has created a mobile logistics robot that can use two arms to handle inventory. Developed to meet increasing demand from online shopping orders, the machine can move around on wheels, autonomously fetching merchandise and carrying it to a shipping container. Because its arms can hold objects of many different shapes and sizes, the robot could be used to replace human staff doing repetitive picking work in high mix, low volume warehouses, where it would not be cost-effective to use dedicated robots for each different product. Hitachi has developed an autonomous two-armed robot that can work in warehouses that ship goods for online retailers. For the robot's appendages, Hitachi used two Epson ProSix C4-A901S industrial robot arms, which have six degrees of freedom of movement, and equipped them with cameras that use a computer vision system to recognize merchandise.

In another sign that Japan loves cute robots, SoftBank's Pepper is proving to be a hit with its consumer launch. The mobile carrier said 1,000 units of the household robot sold out in one minute on Saturday, its first day of consumer sales. The humanoid machine is designed to be a personal robot and a member of the family. It can't do housework, but it can converse, recognize people's emotions, develop its own "feelings" and retrieve information from the Internet such as messages and weather forecasts. SoftBank describes Pepper as the world's first personal robot that has its own emotions. Most of the Peppers were purchased online Saturday, but 30 units were ordered through a drawing held Friday at a SoftBank shop in Tokyo.

AMD's recent chips haven't rocked Intel's PC market dominance, but new chips based on the company's Zen architecture aim to change that next year. On Wednesday it shared initial details about the new FX and seventh-generation A-series chips, which are the brainchild of Jim Keller, a leading mobile chip designer at Apple until AMD hired him in 2012. The new AMD chips will battle Intel's highly anticipated Skylake line, which is designed to bring new wireless charging and data transfer features to laptops. Building on the launch of the fourth generation of its enterprise software suite earlier this year, SAP unveiled the cloud version of S/4Hana at its Sapphire conference on Wednesday. SAP expects most companies to opt for hybrid scenarios combining the on-premises version of the in-memory database platform with the new cloud version.

Persona is one of the latest fashion magazines in Tokyo. It's printed on heavy stock paper and is full of photos of models and clothing. The only thing missing is text. An app recognizes the images, queries a cloud database and then downloads related information such as pricing and availability of dresses. Other photos feature images of tomatoes and wine, triggering a related vegetable delivery service and wine retailer, as well as online coupons.

Amazon has added some additional robotic muscle and computer-vision chops to its warehouses ahead of the tide of holiday shopping orders. The retailing giant said Monday it has 10 of these latest fulfillment centers in operation across the U.S., featuring software and mechanical innovations. The total number of Kiva mobile robots, which transport large vertical racks containing inventory, has topped 15,000 across the U.S., Amazon said Monday. The company agreed to buy Kiva Systems in 2012 and has been adding robot platforms to its warehouses to improve efficiency. Amazon also said it had deployed an inventory-moving robotic arm dubbed Robo-Stow, which according to a press photo is an M-2000iA, made by Japan's Fanuc robotics.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam are using neural networks to help a statistical machine translation systems learn what all human translators know--that the best translation of a word often depends on the context. Such tools are increasingly important as individuals and businesses seek to access information or buy products and services from other countries where different languages are spoken. Statistical machine translation work by breaking sentences into phrase fragments and selecting the most likely translation for each fragment--a process that doesn't always yield the best translation for the sentence as a whole in morphologically rich languages such as those where nouns are inflected for number, case and gender. To improve the word selection of such systems when translating into morphologically rich languages such as Russian, Bulgarian and German, the team used a neural network to analyze the words in context in the source language. Translating sentences into grammatically more complex languages is relatively easy for human translators because they understand the grammatical function of the word in a sentence.

Healthcare electronics maker Omron is showing off its sensing know-how with a huge ping pong-playing robot, but the robot is still easy to beat--for now. The 2.7-meter-tall, three-legged beast looked like something out of "The War of the Worlds" as it was taking on human opponents at the Ceatec tech expo outside Tokyo. When it came to actual tennis table chops, however, it was sometimes all thumbs. Equipped with stereoscopic cameras and computer-vision algorithms to track the position and speed of human players as well as the ball, the machine is designed to be able to play sustained rallies with its ability to predict where the ball will go. Powered by five servomotors, it grips the paddle with a four-axis manipulator commonly seen in pick-and-place industrial robots.