Say what you will about Google's AlphaGo AI, it generally turned up to its championship matches sober. Actually, most AI tend to stay away from the bottle – which makes sense given their lack of mouth, or digestive system, or sense of fun. One UK company is looking to change all that, though. IntelligentX's AI might not actually drink beer, but it is learning how to brew it thanks to machine-learning algorithms. It works like this: IntelligentX has made four different types of beer.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator founded by a Hong Kong-born venture capitalist wants to bring Asia's best AI start-ups to the global stage. Dubbed Zeroth.ai, the AI accelerator was founded by Tak Lo, who most recently was a venture partner at Hong Kong venture capital company Mind Fund and a director at UK-based VC Techstars. "AI for me is something that will move the meter on technology in the next five to 10 years, there's no dispute about that," Lo said. The accelerator programme, which is currently accepting applications from AI start-ups in Asia, will officially begin in November this year. "I want to bring the wealth of experience and network from being a venture capitalist in New York and London to Asia and Hong Kong," Lo said.

Evolution as understood by Charles Darwin was supposed to happen very slowly and gradually. That's why he, and many other scientists, were puzzled by an event that happened about 540 million years ago, known as the Cambrian Explosion. During that period, life as it was known went in overdrive mode, and a world that was mostly comprised by simple life forms, suddenly – in geological scale – became extremely diversified, with most major animal phyla appearing in a span of 25 million years, to then slow down to its normal pace. There are many theories trying to explain it, like the increase in oxygen levels, or the onset of new genetic mechanisms drastically affecting embryo development. A possible explanation was made popular in 2003 by then Oxford professor Andrew Parker, who published the book "In the blink of an eye: how vision sparked the big bang of evolution".

A First Course in Machine Learning by Simon Rogers and Mark Girolami is the best introductory book for ML currently available. It combines rigor and precision with accessibility, starts from a detailed explanation of the basic foundations of Bayesian analysis in the simplest of settings, and goes all the way to the frontiers of the subject such as infinite mixture models, GPs, and MCMC.

Artificial intelligence is slowly seeping in through current techs. Recently, Microsoft has published the source code for its Project Malmo. Project Malmo is a tool that will allow anyone to make artificial intelligence experiments when it comes to Minecraft games based on the programming skills provided. According to Neuro Gadget, the project was previously announced back in March but it was named as AIX. Now, with a new name, the company released it for the public in order for people to test it out.

Neural networks are changing the Internet. Inspired by the networks of neurons inside the human brain, these deep mathematical models can learn discrete tasks by analyzing enormous amounts of data. They've learned to recognize faces in photos, identify spoken commands, and translate text from one language to another. They're helping to choose what you see when you query the Google search engine or visit your Facebook News Feed. All this is sharpening the behavior of online services.

Tech giant Google has added to its vast technology services stable by acquiring Paris-based startup Moodstocks, which has developed machine learning based image recognition technology for smartphones. The acquisition by Google will see it add the recognition technology of Moodstocks to its already large number of services it offers which use machine learning, such as Google Translate, Smart Reply in Inbox and the Goggle app. With many of its services already relying on machine learning technologies, Google's acquisition of Moodstocks will help with implementing visual recognition. The Moodstocks team of engineers and researchers, based in Paris, developed new algorithms for Visual pattern recognition and machine learning, as well as a technology for the recognition of images and objects via mobile devices. Head of the R&D Center of Google France, Vincent Simonet, wrote in a blog on July 7 to announce the deal, said that while great steps forward were taken by Google in terms of Visual recognition, there was still much to be done in this area, stating that the company expects that to be where Moodstocks comes into its own.

While everyone keeps saying that robots are not a job security threat, it is also true that robots are steadily getting better at tasks. Enter this little bad boy, the robot that won Amazon's Picking Challenge. A team of engineers from Netherland's TU Del have won this year's challenge, both in the picking and stowing finals. They dubbed their creation "Delft." The cool thing is their robot is no ordinary warehouse bot; it relies on a suction cup, a "two-fingered" gripper, and the combination of deep learning artificial intelligence and depth-sensing cameras to get the job done.

Minecraft is one of those rare tech phenomenons that came out of the blue (a single person and a Java compiler in this case) and went on to somehow revolutionize its field. For the blocky building-survival simulator that field is definitely gaming, but by effectively redefining the sandbox genre, Minecraft has managed to affect an expected number of other fields as well. Ever since its humble beginnings and especially after Microsoft took over and allowed it to really take off in popularity, the Minecraft world has been a canvas for incredible creativity with projects ranging from epic 1:1 scale reconstruction of buildings to working PC emulators inside a Minecraft map and even a functioning phone. But it is perhaps Microsoft itself that has managed to find the most exciting use of the sandbox to date. It is called Project Malmo (formerly known an Project AIX) and its purpose is to experiment with and train artificial intelligence and advance cutting-edge technologies like machine learning and neural networks.

Despite being a good few decades old, the basis of the Turing test -- developed by the computer science genius Alan Turning -- remains the exact same to this day. It asks whether a computer can trick a human into believing they are speaking with another fellow human. In one part of the test, a human judge is asked to interact with two hidden objects -- one is a human and the other a machine -- to determine if they can distinguish between the two. And if not, that AI has passed the Turing test. There has been a lot of challengers who have claimed that AI has actually passed the test.