After a chatbot pretending to be a 13-year-old named Eugene Goostman "passed" a Turing test a few years ago, experts in artificial intelligence got together and decided that a traditional Turing test might not be all that effective in measuring the intelligence of a computer program after all. Instead, they came up with (among many other things) the Winograd Schema Challenge, which is intended to determine how well an artificial intelligence system handles commonsense reasoning: understanding the basics about how the world works, and implementing that knowledge in useful and accurate ways. A few weeks ago, the very first Winograd Schema Challenge took place at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in New York City. We spoke with Charlie Ortiz, director of the Laboratory for AI and Natural Language Processing at Nuance Communications and one of the organizers of the Winograd Schema Challenge, about how things went, why the challenge is important, and what it means for the future of AI. The Winograd Schema Challenge tasks computer programs with answering a specific type of simple, commonsense question called a pronoun disambiguation problem (PDP).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your soft-bodied Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. He is currently a visiting researcher in the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Lab (Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, USA) under the supervision of Prof. Josh Bongard. He wrote in to share some of his latest publications and videos, and it's fascinating.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your laser-focused Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Near Earth Autonomy, a Pittsburgh-based robotics and aerospace company (and CMU spin-off), has discovered the secret to flying a drone autonomously around obstacles without GPS: use a massive hexcopter that can haul around a Velodyne lidar. R1 is a new "personal humanoid" platform from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).

I was going to start this column with some new productivity figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I realized that at least half of the readers would quit right there. Productivity is one of those subjects that fascinates economists and bores, or mystifies, almost everyone else. Instead, let's start with a little story. Imagine that it's 1890 and you and a friend have bought a donkey and cart and started a moving company that transports heavy objects, such as sofas and beds. If you work hard, you can manage two deliveries a day, for each of which you charge a price that, if adjusted for inflation, would amount to fifty-five dollars today. Let's say overhead, such as advertising and food for the donkey, comes to ten dollars a day.

If reality is a game--a vast, snow-globe-y sort of experiment that plays out according to the hard rules of physics and the loose rules of story--then it is, in contemporary game-design parlance, a persistent one. We enter it when it is already under way, and we hope, for the sake of our children, that we exit before it's finished. There are advantages and drawbacks for those who, like us, have arrived to this game relatively late. While we benefit from the invention of penicillin, of airplanes, of the Internet, we also suffer antibiotic resistance, looming climate disaster, online comments. And one pleasure enjoyed by our forebears, now largely denied to us, is the thrill of cartographic discovery. Our world is mostly mapped, its common species mostly named.

China Miéville has long had spiders on the brain. In his breakthrough novel, 2000's "Perdido Street Station," a mysterious, spiderlike being called the Weaver assists a scientist named Isaac who's trying to save the fantastical city of Bas-Lag from a catastrophic infestation. In Miéville's new novella, "The Last Days of New Paris," the streets of Paris in 1950 have gone haywire after the detonation of a reality-altering bomb that brings various Surrealist works to frightening life, including an arachnoid manifestation reminiscent of Odilon Redon's painting "The Smiling Spider." "There's something about the arachnid," Miéville told me recently, on the phone from his home in London. Bataille writes about the spider as an avatar of formlessness, this very, very powerful thing.

Without a helpful hashtag, picking up on sarcasm online can be hard even for humans. But now a machine learning system can automatically recognise when individuals are being sarcastic. Mining people's comments on social media is big business. Advertisers track people's attitudes and moods, companies and governments follow public opinion. But people being sarcastic and saying the opposite of what they actually mean is super tricky to pick up on.

Daniel Bartlett thinks nothing of driving halfway across the UK to visit places that aren't really there. A couple of months ago, he made a 500-kilometre round-trip from London to defend an alien portal at the lifeboat station on Cromer Pier, on the east coast of England. In between scoffing a portion of chips and an ice cream, he coordinated with around 50 people at other key coastal positions from Scotland across to the Netherlands. Over the course of an afternoon, they took control of the North Sea, turning it from blue to green. Barlett has been playing Ingress for two and a half years.

To mark the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, the Smithsonian has revealed a stunning high resolution 3D model of the command module'Columbia,' the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin'Buzz' Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. The stunning virtual 3-D model that will allow the public a look inside the car-sized Apollo 11 command module. As one of the most sophisticated scans ever made of a historic artifact, it employed seven different scanning technologies to capture nearly 1 trillion high-resolution measurements producing more than a terabyte of compressed data resulting in a highly detailed master model. To mark the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, the Smithsonian has revealed a stunning high resolution 3D model of the command module'Columbia,' the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin'Buzz' Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. As one of the most sophisticated scans ever made of a historic artifact, researchers at the Smithsonian employed seven different scanning technologies to capture nearly 1 trillion high-resolution measurements, producing more than a terabyte of compressed data.

Rare images of a wildcat on the brink of extinction have been caught by animal protection volunteers in Siberia. The endangered Pallas's wildcats have been hunted by poachers for their fur which can be sold on the black market to be made into mittens. Native to remote regions of southern Siberia, as well as Central Asia and China, they are seldom seen, and known for their reclusive and solitary lives. 'They are secretive and do not like to be seen, making these images rather special,' reported The Siberian Times. This cat was caught on camera a whisker away from an animal camera trap as it surveyed the scene in the Altai Nature Reserve in mountainous southern Siberia.