Tonight, Lee Sedol is supported by one 33-year-old human brain and approximately 12 ounces of coffee. At its core, the game of Go, which originated in China more than 2,500 years ago, is an abstract war simulation. Players start with a completely blank board and place black and white stones, one at a time, to surround territory. Once placed, stones do not move, and they're removed only if they're "killed"--that is, surrounded completely by the opponent's stones. And so the game goes--black stone, white stone, black stone, white stone--until the board is covered in an intricate tapestry of black and white.

McCann has appointed an articificial intelligence creative director AI-CD?, who will be attending McCann Worldgroup's new employee welcoming ceremony on April 1, along with 11 new college graduates. AI-CD? was actually created by the agency under its'Creative Genome Project', the first in a series of projects undertaken by the agency's'McCann Millenials taskforce'. The artificial intelligence can give creative direction on commercials because the data that forms the basis of the algorithm includes deconstructed, tagged and analysed TV shows, as well as data on the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commersion Confederation's CM Festival. President & CEO of McCann Japan, Yasuyuki Katagi said: "Artificial intelligence is already being used to create a wide variety of entertainment, including music, movies, and TV drama, so we're very enthusiastic about the potential of AI-CD ß for the future of ad creation. The whole company is 100 percent on board to support the development of our A.I. employee."

IBM is about to deliver the foundation of a brain-inspired supercomputer to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the federal government's top research institutions. The delivery is one small "blade" within a server rack with 16 chips, dubbed TrueNorth, and is modeled after the way the human brain functions. Silicon Valley is awash in optimism about artificial intelligence, largely based on the progress that deep learning neural networks are making in solving big problems. Companies from Google to Nvidia are hoping they'll provide the AI smarts for self-driving cars and other tough problems. It is within this environment that IBM has been pursuing solutions in brain-inspired supercomputers.

McCann Erickson Japan is taking artificial intelligence to the next level, creating and appointing the world's first robot creative director. The robot, called AI-CD?, will be assigned as a creative director to client accounts and will provide creative direction for commercials. It will also evaluate and gain learnings from results after commercials have aired to ensure it improves for future projects. AI-CD? was developed through a new taskforce in the agency, McCann Millennials, a group of staff members born between 1980 and 2000 who apparently care not for the future of their own careers, or the possible rising of the machines à la The Matrix. The robot is able to give creative direction for commercials, drawing from a database of tagged and analysed TV commercials from the past 10 years of winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commercial Confederation's annual CM Festival (ACC CM Festival).

The ancient ruins of Palmyra, one of Syria's oldest cities, have stood for 3,000 years, but, since last May, the Unesco World Heritage site has been facing some of the most brutal threats to its existence. Located in an oasis northeast of the Syrian capital of Damascus, Palmyra has become a significant symbolic and military position in the now 5-year-old Syrian conflict. After seizing the city of roughly 50,000 residents last May, the Islamic State group was forced out of Palmyra over the weekend by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad. On a strategic level, retaking Palmyra gives the Syrian regime a strong military base for future operations against the militants' other strongholds as well as renewed control over some of Syria's most important oil and gas fields. But regaining Palmyra is also a highly symbolic win for the Syrian regime -- now trying to salvage whatever is left of the ancient ruins -- in its quest to position itself as a key partner in the fight against the terrorist group, also known as ISIS. An aerial view of the historic city of Palmyra, in Homs Goveronorate, Syria, is seen in this still image taken from a drone video, March 28, 2016.

Nintendo will launch its first app for mobile devices in the U.S. on March 31, the video game maker announced Tuesday. Interestingly, Nintendo's first app, called Miitomo, isn't a game but a social experience where users interact with each other using Mii avatars, which were introduced with the Nintendo Wii video game console. Users start by downloading the app and creating their Mii with an avatar editor, or using a picture of themselves taken with their smartphone camera. Users can also import their Mii from the Wii or Nintendo 3DS through a QR code. Users then link the app to their Facebook or Twitter accounts to add friends, then answer a series of questions to help spur conversations.

So he and his business partner, Dan Roth, decided to create a program that would help lawyers manage electronic documents for litigation. Their idea led them to purchase an e-discovery application. By 2000, Leib and his partner launched their own creation, Discovery Cracker. "We saw a gap in the marketplace," Leib says. Lawyers need tools to keep up with it." Instead of wading through piles of paper, lawyers now deal with terabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of documents. E-discovery, legal research and document review are more sophisticated due to the abundance of data. So while working as chief strategy officer at kCura in Chicago, Leib saw a need again in the market. "For years, lawyers have been stuck with antiquated tools that focus primarily … on Boolean search. Better tools are needed to truly understand data." "What is the future of the industry?

In addition to work authored by humans, it also considers the literary output of artificial intelligence software. And the results of the latter are--surprisingly and scarily--not that bad. Researchers from Japan's Future University Hakodate submitted a short story called "The Day a Computer Writes a Novel," or "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi," and it comes across as something a human might have written (though not perhaps a human called Jonathan Franzen): I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans. The prize was created in the memory of Hoshi Shinichi, a science fiction writer whose novels include The Whimsical Robot.

While fans eagerly await the release of the'Tom Clancy's The Division' game, Ubisoft Entertainment and BETC Paris announce the launch of Collapse, a realistic, local and global end of society simulator. Collapse is an interactive digital experience, created by BETC Paris to promote Ubisoft's upcoming online open world action role-playing game, 'Tom Clancy's The Division'. Based on the game's fictive yet realistic storyline, which takes place in a society on the brink of destruction, Collapse is an end of society simulator that uses real data to create a personalized experience of events to set the scene before the game launches on March 8. Collapse is a powerful reminder of the fragility and complexity of the interdependent systems that we rely on daily – power, transport, banking, hospitals and communications. When one fails, others follow, creating a deadly domino effect that can cripple society in a matter of days. Through a sequence of interactive storytelling, Collapse takes viewers through the consequences of the fictional Variola Chimera pandemic, demonstrating how quickly the cities and society that we take for granted can fall apart. Launching on March 8, 2016, Tom Clancy's The Division (TCTD) is set in a society on the brink of collapse.

Chat apps are very popular and arguably, most people would prefer engaging in a chat conversation rather than make a phone call. Going by recent buzz, it's apparent that tech giants are planning to bring chat conversations to advertisers and marketers. But there are many startups out there already using chat conversations to simplify user queries. Yellow Messenger is one such Bangalore-based startup. Instead of a team of people answering your queries however, it has put in place an Artificial Intelligence-powered interface that converses with users and responds to their queries related to shopping, real estate, recharge, etc.