When will all these smart AI advances mean I can have a robot in my house to do the washing up, vacuum my bedroom, pick up my dirty socks - that sort of thing? Robotics is another sub-field of AI where there have been some exciting developments lately: there are already robot vacuum cleaners for instance, although they can't do your washing up at the moment. A bit more exciting than robot vacuum cleaners are driverless cars - the most recent Darpa Grand Challenge, for example, saw five automated driving systems complete a 150-mile race across the Mojave Desert with nary a human at the wheel. A real world application of such a system will be operational in the UK next year when business travellers using Heathrow's Terminal 5 will be able to use one of these driverless pod cars to shuttle them between a car park and the terminal building. Noel Sharkey, a professor of AI and robotics at the University of Sheffield, told silicon.com that he foresees even more applications for driverless cars in future: "I think that one of the big areas in AI will be the independent car - which'll be wonderful for say disabled people or blind people; you don't have to worry about a taxi you just get out and flag down a car," he said.

That was the last time mission controllers heard from it. According to the scenario a NASA accident- review board deemed most likely, the Lander dropped out of orbit, deployed its parachute, and began firing its descent engines to slow its fall-just as it was programmed to do. But as the craft's three landing legs automatically unfolded, sensors in the legs sent false signals to the Lander's control software, indicating that it had touched down. Not programmed to deal with such a scenario, the software ignored signs that the craft was still aloft and, at an altitude of 40 meters, shut down the descent engines. Gravity took over, and the delicate craft slammed into the rocky Martian surface with the energy of a high-speed car crash. That same year, but millions of kilometers away, another NASA craft dealt with crisis more adroitly.

Mr Gregory was a pioneer of human psychology, and made significant advances in the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence. Born in London in 1923, he was the son of astronomer Christopher Gregory. Mr Gregory spent five years in the RAF during the Second World War, after being called up at the age of 18. After exhibiting obvious academic talent the RAF offered Mr Gregory a scholarship to study philosophy and experimental psychology at Downing College, Cambridge and after proving himself a successful scientist and inventor he moved to Edinburgh, where he took up a post as professor of bionics. There he co-founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, the first of its kind in the UK.

In the months leading up to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a landmark test for autonomous vehicles, Sebastian Thrun, the head of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab, could not know whether his team's robotic vehicle, nicknamed Stanley, would triumph. Yet when interviewed by NOVA producers Jason Spingarn-Koff and Joe Seamans, this robotics enthusiast was brimming with excitement, confident that the race would herald a new era of vehicles that drive themselves. Stanford computer scientist Sebastian Thrun has long been driven to make smart machines. Now a smart machine named Stanley can drive him. Sebastian Thrun: It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.

The 3-D research was seminal in the fields of computer vision and artificial intelligence. Known as "constraint propagation," the technique is now used in industry for solving problems like route scheduling, package routing and construction scheduling. At M.I.T., Dr. Waltz was taught by Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. Dr. Waltz graduated in 1972, then taught computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and, later, at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. But it was as a member of a group of researchers at the Thinking Machines Corporation, in Cambridge, Mass., that Dr. Waltz made his breakthrough in information retrieval.

"In the early 1970s, he presented a paper in France on buying and selling by computer, what is now called electronic commerce," said Whitfield Diffie, an Internet security expert who worked as a researcher for Dr. McCarthy at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. And in the study of artificial intelligence, "no one is more influential than John," Mr. Diffie said. While teaching mathematics at Dartmouth in 1956, Dr. McCarthy was the principal organizer of the first Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The idea of simulating human intelligence had been discussed for decades, but the term "artificial intelligence" -- originally used to help raise funds to support the conference -- stuck. In 1958, Dr. McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of "discovery" -- providing documents relevant to a lawsuit -- the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates. But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, "e-discovery" software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-size I.B.M. computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords," he wrote on his video screen, borrowing a line from a "Simpsons" episode. From now on, if the answer is "the computer champion on "Jeopardy!," the question will be, "What is Watson?" For I.B.M., the showdown was not merely a well-publicized stunt and a $1 million prize, but proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them. Watson, specifically, is a "question answering machine" of a type that artificial intelligence researchers have struggled with for decades -- a computer akin to the one on "Star Trek" that can understand questions posed in natural language and answer them. Watson showed itself to be imperfect, but researchers at ...

Joseph Weizenbaum, whose famed conversational computer program, Eliza, foreshadowed the potential of artificial intelligence, but who grew skeptical about the potential for technology to improve the human condition, died on March 5 in Gröben, Germany. The cause was complications of cancer, said his daughter Sharon Weizenbaum. Eliza, written while Mr. Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and 1965 and named after Eliza Doolittle, who learned proper English in "Pygmalion" and "My Fair Lady," was a groundbreaking experiment in the study of human interaction with machines. The program made it possible for a person typing in plain English at a computer terminal to interact with a machine in a semblance of a normal conversation. To dispense with the need for a large real-world database of information, the software parodied the part of a Rogerian therapist, frequently reframing a client's statements as questions.

Apple has released huge updates to its music apps, helping them work better together and with the company's new hardware. Both GarageBand and Logic Pro X – respectively the consumer and pro versions of Apple's music creation tools – have received major updates. The versions for the iPhone, iPad and Mac have all got updates, which allow the three to work together better. Chief among the updates is that both apps will now support the new Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro. Apple has now updated almost all of its apps to make use of the small touch screen, and in the music app it provides new buttons – which allow it to be used like a piano or a drum kit – all of which can be customised.