RESEARCHERS in the field of artificial intelligence have long been intrigued by games, and not just as a way of avoiding work. Games provide an ideal setting to explore important elements of the design of cleverer machines, such as pattern recognition, learning and planning. They also hold out the tantalising possibility of fame and fortune should the program ever clobber a human champion. Ever since the stunning victory of Deep Blue, a program running on an IBM supercomputer, over Gary Kasparov, then world chess champion, in 1997, it has been clear that computers would dominate that particular game. Today, though, they are pressing the attack on every front.

GIVEN the choice, who would you rather trust to safeguard your future: a bloodsucking lawyer or a cold, calculating computer? Granted, it's not much of a choice, since neither lawyers nor computers are renowned for their compassion. But it is a choice that you may well encounter in the not-too-distant future, as software based on "artificial intelligence" (AI) starts to dispense legal advice. Instead of paying a lawyer by the hour, you will have the option of consulting intelligent legal services via the web. While this might sound outlandish, experts believe that the advent of smart software capable of giving good, solid legal advice could revolutionise the legal profession.

JUST as native English-speakers stumble with Japanese, the Japanese struggle mightily with English, not to mention Korean or Chinese. In the widely used TOEFL tests of English as a foreign language, Japan invariably ranks second from bottom among the 29 countries participating in the scheme. Compared with the 150m people around the world who speak English as a second language, there are only 9m non-native speakers of Japanese--and most of those were forced to learn the language during Japan's era of colonial occupation, and are now dying of old age. For those who put their faith in technology, therefore, it was encouraging to hear Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, demonstrate his linguistic skills a few weeks ago with a palm-sized gizmo that provided instantaneous translations of spoken Japanese into near-flawless English and Chinese. Mr Abe can manage perfectly well without such a device, being one of the few Japanese prime ministers in recent years to speak English fluently.

JUST below a half-opened garage door a tiny device can be seen at the feet of someone lurking in the shadows. It looks like a blue dragonfly. Then its miniature wings begin to flap as it slips under the door and darts along the street. After rising through the air it stops to hover outside the window of a building several storeys high. There is an opening on the roof, and it slips inside.

Ever since RoboCop and Terminator 2: Judgment Day hit our screens a quarter century ago, people have dreaming about the use of robots to stop making hamburgers and packing boxes and start protecting the general populace. That's the mission statement of the 300-pound K5 security robot: a hefty robotic alternative to the regular security guard who packs an impressive number of features. Having been in development for a few years, the K5 has been making the news this week -- after being spotted in its (his?) new job as a mall cop at Stanford Shopping Center, where the sighting has even prompted the hashtag #securityrobot. Related: China's first robotic security guard makes its debut "Think of the K5 as an advanced anomaly detection device," Stacy Dean Stephens, manufacturing company Knightscope's vice president of marketing and sales, tells Digital Trends. "It patrols within a geofenced area using its sensors to alert security professionals of potential threats. Each machine has 360-degree high definition video for both day and low light; thermal imaging; two-way audio with public address, intercom and broadcast; license plate recognition; and people detection -- to name a few [of its attributes]."

One of the featured speakers at the inaugural Text By The Bay conference, held in San Francisco in April 2015, drew laughter when describing a neural network question-answering model that could beat human players in a trivia game. While such performance by computers is fairly well known to the general public, thanks to IBM's Watson cognitive computer, the speaker, natural language processing (NLP) researcher Richard Socher, said, the neural network model he described "was built by one grad student using deep learning" rather than by a large team with the resources of a global corporation behind them. Socher, now CEO of machine learning developer MetaMind, did not intend his remarks to be construed as a comparison of Watson to the academic model he and his colleagues built. As an illustration of the new technical and cultural landscape around NLP, however, the laughter Socher's comment drew was an acknowledgment that basic and applied research in language processing is no longer the exclusive province of those with either deep pockets or strictly academic intentions. Indeed, new tools and new techniques--particularly open source technologies such as Google's word2vec neural text processing tool--combined with steady increases in computing power, have broadened the potential for natural language processing far beyond the research lab or supercomputer.

Advances in deep learning have led Elon Musk and others to start preparing for the AI apocalypse. And indeed, by feeding terabytes into neural networks, computers are now able to understand voices, recognise faces and sift through data with unprecedented accuracy. And yet, advances in so-called unsupervised learning - which finds the structure or relationships in data inputs without training in the way that a child learns from experience - are almost non-existent. In recent years, Yann LeCun of Facebook, Geoffrey Hinton of Google and Yoshua Bengio from the University of Montreal have made significant advances in machine learning through their use of deep neural networks and other learning techniques. For example, Yaniv Taigman, one of my co-founders at face.com (which was acquired by Facebook in June 2012), recently published that the company achieved a 97.25 per cent accuracy rate for face recognition, just 0.25 per cent below human perception.

Thirty-five years ago the TV series Knight Rider envisioned an artificially intelligent car that could develop a friendly rapport with its driver. That 1982 Pontiac Trans Am--also known as the Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT)--dutifully served as Michael Knight's crime-fighting partner, monitored his health through sensors in the seat and even used voice analysis to respond to the sarcasm in Knight's cornball quips. Your next car won't reach KITT's level of awareness, wit or empathy--but Honda, Toyota and several other companies really are planning to make AI standard in all the vehicles they produce. Honda unveiled one of the more ambitious--and fanciful--visions for AI in the cockpit at last week's U.S. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Its New Electric Urban Vehicle (NeuV) is a self-driving concept car that uses Honda's talking Automated Network Assistant, or HANA, to analyze and respond to data the vehicle collects about driver and passenger preferences and behavior.

The future of room service has arrived, with a number of hotels are now giving the job to robots instead of humans. The Crowne Plaza San Jose-Silicon Valley hotel and the Aloft Hotels brand of Starwood Hotels are utilising androids in the hospitality sector, both created by Savioke. Dash is the latest addition to the Crowne Plaza brand, that is owned by Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG). It stands 3ft-tall and weighs less than 100lbs. Dash is the latest addition to the Crowne Plaza workforce as it tends to customers' needs The robot can navigate between floors travelling at the same speed as a human, and can even call the lift using a special Wi-Fi sensor.

A new pair of Russian robots has been developed that can track and attack humans from more than four miles away. The devices are designed for use on the Russian border, and claim to accurately detect and attack ground and aerial threats long before they reach Russian soil. Key technology at the robots' disposal include radar, HD and thermal video imaging, and multiple long-range grenade launchers. Weapons experts have also been working on a high-tech explosives system, labelled the'Alpha Device,' to work in tandem with the Flight surveillance robots. The first of the two new robots will act as a pair of scrupulous eyes for Russian border guards.