This article was originally published at Stratfor.com. Editor's Note: The Global Affairs column is curated by Stratfor's board of contributors, a diverse group of thinkers whose expertise inspires rigorous and innovative thought. Their opinions are their own and serve to complement and even challenge our beliefs. We welcome that challenge, and we hope our readers do too. Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the most famous Renaissance man in history, once claimed, "The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding."

Domino's is taking a page out of Santa's book on efficient winter transportation. The global pizza chain, which has already invested in high-tech delivery methods like autonomous robots, drones, "zero-click" ordering apps and satellite tracking to deliver food, is now training reindeer to transport pies. Reindeer delivery may be part of a contingency plan for Domino's Japan ahead of what is expected to be a particularly cold and snowy winter, RocketNews24 reports. The chain is attempting a trial period for performing training exercises in the city of Ishikari-- a particularly ice-prone area in Hokkaido-- to figure out if its reindeer delivery initiative is feasible. The technique will involve insulated pizza containers strapped to the animals' backs.

This Sunday, Oct. 9, 2016, photo shows a damaged Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on a table in Richmond, Va., after it caught fire earlier in the day. Samsung Electronics said Tuesday, Oct. 11, that it is discontinuing production of Galaxy Note 7 smartphones permanently, a day after stopping global sales of the ill-fated devices. LOS ANGELES -- What's worse, a phone that explodes in your face or a drone that falls from the skies? It's a question worth pondering as we embark on our annual list of the top tech turkeys of the year. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The Samsung Note 7 received rave reviews for wireless charging, water resistant design and the ability to unlock the phone with your iris.

The underwater search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 found man-made objects on the ocean floor, later revealed to be debris from a nearby shipwreck. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search for the missing plane, said in its operational update Wednesday that sonar from Dong Hai Jiu 101 found the debris. The man-made object turned out to be a metal box likely a part of an ancient shipwreck previously detected during the underwater search. Another site of interest inspected by the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) on board the Chinese vessel Dong Hai Jiu 101 revealed only a rock formation. "Dong Hai Jiu 101 has conducted a total of 13 ROV dives during the swing. Two dives were completed by Dong Hai Jiu 101 in the past week with one sonar contact identified as geology," ATSB said in the statement.

Go master Cho Chikun triumphed Wednesday in his final game against DeepZenGo, a Japanese artificial intelligence system, to win the three-game series 2-1. Cho, 60, has won 74 titles in his long career, the largest number in Japan. He defeated DeepZenGo with the 167th move in the third game of the series, which was played on even terms with no handicaps. DeepZenGo uses deep learning and other advanced technologies. It is being developed with support mainly from Dwango Co., a video-sharing website operator, and the University of Tokyo. "I felt as if I was playing with a human, because (DeepZenGo) has both strong and weak points," Cho said after the final game.

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, announced yesterday that the MXNet deep learning framework would become "[Amazon's] deep learning framework of choice." Amazon Web Services is expected to announce a new version of its PostgreSQL database for its cloud customers during its AWS re:Invent conference next week, according to a Fortune report. Democratizing Machine Learning has always been BigML's founding mission, so we are continually searching for new opportunities. As such, when a company is interested in our technology and is willing to help us further our cause of "Machine Learning for everyone", we feel the urge to collaborate. This is exactly what happened with our new education partner.

In cities around the world, the spread of technology is giving rise to a unique problem – collisions between phone-obsessed walkers. But one group in Singapore believes it may have the answer in the form of a self-driving scooter. According to its makers, the vehicle could shuttle around people multitasking or mesmerised by their gadgets, helping to avoid collisions on the street. The one-seater, four wheel, 50 kg (110 lbs) vehicle travels at a top speed of 4mph (6 kmh) and has laser sensors to help navigate around obstacles. The scooter, developed by the National University of Singapore (NUS), is the city-state's latest experiment with driverless vehicles as it pushes ahead with its vision of using autonomous technology to help deal with the challenges of its limited land and labour.

Twenty-eight years ago the little science fiction show that could, "Mystery Science Theater 3000," premiered on Thanksgiving Day. It all started with one Earthling, series creator Joel Hodgson, and his gang of lovable robot puppets. Together they drifted through space in the "Satellite of Love," warmly lampooning low-budget B-movies with titles like "Teenagers From Outer Space" and "The Leech Woman." It was an odd show whose shoe-string budget and screwball tone often mimicked the very movies it skewered. The misfit humor struck a note with fans and despite multiple series cancellations and resurrections, (including a recasting of Hodgson with Mike Nelson), the series endured for 197 episodes. And now, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, "MST3K" will rise again -- this time on Netflix with Hodgson once again steering the ship and new host Jonah Ray (the Nerdist Podcast).

Network Mind facilitates the management of millions of network elements with millisecond response time and automatic adaptation and optimization based on service changes. Network Mind is therefore capable of helping telecom operators and enterprises achieve differentiated, self-adaptive control of complex services in ultra-large networks. The amount of network elements, data traffic, and types of service in communication networks is soaring as new technologies continue to emerge, including 5G, the Internet of Things, Software-Defined Networking, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. This results in a level of network complexity that is impossible to manually control through defined rules. How automatic modeling can be used to realize intelligent network control and management is a major topic of study at many research institutions.

Like a university student taking a gap year to recharge their batteries after a particularly gruelling exam period, the mainline Assassin's Creed series gets a much-needed rest this year. Having spectacularly failed their French A level and scraped a pass in the mandatory post-Brexit Victorian English GCSE, here Ubisoft offer up some old past papers for assessment. Comprising Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations, this remastered Ezio collection arrives in timely fashion before the franchise hits the big screen next year. The titular Assassins are apparently the good guys, despite their deadly name and the fact that they plug our modern day hero Desmond Miles into a Matrix-esque machine called the Animus and make him kill cartloads of people, using only the genetic memories of his ancestors and an alluring array of daggers and swords. Both the Assassins and their Templar opponents are obsessed with finding the Apples of Eden, which are basically Golden Delicious on steroids, full of knowledge and almost certainly worth getting chucked out of any garden for.