Google's AlphaGo computer program has won a third and decisive encounter with a top-ranked player of the Chinese board game Go in a victory marking significant developments in artificial intelligence. Lee Sedol, who is the world's second best player of the strategy game, lost three games in a row in Seoul this week, with the latest AlphaGo victory on Saturday handing Google the best-of-five match. "I've never played a game where I felt this amount of pressure, and I wasn't able to overcome this pressure," Lee said at a post-game press conference. Go has simple rules, but is highly intuitive and complex in practice. Mastering it has been an exceptionally difficult task for even the world's best IT designers.

China's leading Internet-search company, Baidu, has developed a voice system that can recognize English and Mandarin speech better than people, in some cases. The new system, called Deep Speech 2, is especially significant in how it relies entirely on machine learning for translation. Whereas older voice-recognition systems include many handcrafted components to aid audio processing and transcription, the Baidu system learned to recognize words from scratch, simply by listening to thousands of hours of transcribed audio. The technology relies on a powerful technique known as deep learning, which involves training a very large multilayered virtual network of neurons to recognize patterns in vast quantities of data. The Baidu app for smartphones lets users search by voice, and also includes a voice-controlled personal assistant called Duer (see "Baidu's Duer Joins the Personal Assistant Party").

Fighting cyber attacks with artificial intelligence The next frontier of anti-virus software is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to not only predict what threats are out there, but to also actively fight back before they strike. This is according to American-based Cylance's chief marketing officer, Greg Fitzgerald, speaking at the NetEvents Press and Analyst Summit in Rome, Italy.The company says it is "revolutionising cyber security through the use of AI and machine learning to proactively prevent advanced persistent threats and malware". Cylance today announced it is expanding into the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) with the establishment of a London-based team led by Evan Davidson, former enterprise sales director at FireEye. It also established a channel partnership with CoreSec Systems, which supplies cyber security and networking solutions in Sweden and Denmark.

It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago. Google's AlphaGo has won two of the first three games against grandmaster Lee Sedol in a Go tournament, showing the dramatic extent to which AI has improved over the years. That fateful day when machines finally become smarter than humans has never appeared closer--yet we seem no closer in grasping the implications of this epochal event. Late last year, SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk warned that AI could take over the world, sparking a flurry of commentary both in condemnation and support. For such a monumental future event, there's a startling amount of disagreement about whether or not it'll even happen, or what form it will take.

Social networking giant Facebook is using its artificial intelligence (AI) technology and resources to map the entire Earth and launch the world's most detailed population maps that will help it beam cheap internet to remote areas. To begin with, the Facebook AI team crunched 14.6 billion images of maps from across 20 countries, including India, covering 21.6 million sq kms to come up with the first detailed map of human settlement for these countries. "This is an impressive project from our team developing solar-powered planes for beaming down internet connectivity and our AI research team. Many people live in remote communities and accurate data on where people live doesn't always exist," wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a latest post. The 20 countries mapped were Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

The move didn't make sense to the humans packed into the sixth floor of Seoul's Four Seasons hotel. But the Google machine saw it quite differently. The machine knew the move wouldn't make sense to all those humans. And yet it played the move anyway, because this machine has seen so many moves that no human ever has. In the second game of this week's historic Go match between Lee Sedol, one of the world's top players, and AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent computing system built by a small team of Google researchers, this surprisingly skillful machine made a move that flummoxed everyone from the throngs of reporters and photographers to the match commentators to, yes, Lee Sedol himself.

Apple has come under fire for its use of conflict minerals in iPhones (so have many other device manufacturers, to be fair) before, and the company has just introduced how it aims to reduce its environmental impact. It comes by the way of Liam, a robot that disassembles old iPhones into their core components. The tungsten from the device's alert module will become a cutting tool for example, while the silver contained therein is used for solar panels -- possibly including the ones powering Cupertino's Thailand operations. With the disposable nature of electronics, seeing moves like this is entirely welcome.

Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance, expects to see more innovators trying to tap into the unbanked and unrepresented consumer market. He said: "The firm Pockit, for example, gives customers an account and card that they can use to manage their money and make payments. Users can deposit money into their account at thousands of locations across the UK or have their salaries or benefits paid into their account. Pockit users also get cash back deals on the high street and online." So-called "challenger banks" are popping up and Monese is the latest to make waves.

Artificial intelligence (AI) advocates within enterprise IT teams must focus their efforts on solving "real business problems" if they are to convince the board to support the technology. That was the key message from BGL Group's insight and technology manager, who was speaking at Computing's Big Data and Analytics Summit 2016 this morning. Mike Maddock began by spelling out the differences between the public's perception of AI, and what it can now realistically achieve for the enterprise. He described Gartner's recent prediction that, by 2020, five per cent of financial transactions across the world will be carried out by AI, as a "bold claim". He also cast doubt on the usefulness of hypothesis-driven AI, as epitomised IBM's Watson, which achieved fame after its victory in the US gameshow Jeopardy.

Google DeepMind AI program AlphaGo defeated human Go world champion, Lee Sedol, in a five game series. The victory draws the week-long Challenge Series tournament in South Korea to a conclusion. This win marks a major milestone for artificial intelligence research, as Go is a fairly simple game, but has proven to be infamously difficult for computers to master due to the vast number of potential moves. Many Go players say the game primarily relies on intuition as a strategy. The victory is also significant, as it marks the first time in history that an AI program beat one of the best Go players in the world.