Computers may have us beat at chess and checkers, but new research suggests our brains still have an edge when it comes to solving certain tricky problems thanks to a very human trait: intuition. Scientists in Denmark have found that people who played a game that simulated a complex calculation in physics sometimes did better than their silicon rivals. "The big surprise we had was that some of the players actually had solutions that were of high quality and of shorter duration than any computer algorithms could find," said Jacob Friis Sherson, a physicist at Aarhus University who co-wrote the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Experts say the results could advance the quest to develop effective quantum computers, something most major universities and several tech companies are working on as they seek to accelerate processing power. Such computers use individual atoms to store information and it's hoped they could one day outperform even the fastest conventional silicon-based supercomputers.

David Marcus, who heads Facebook's Messenger platform, tells Jefferson Graham how automated chat bots can improve the shopping and customer service experience, on #TalkingTech. SAN FRANCISCO -- Clicking a buy button on a website is so 20th century. Now the next big thing is conversing with a computerized robot. Used by 900 million people, Messenger has a major new look and mission, thanks to former PayPal chief David Marcus, who left the payment giant in 2014 to transform Facebook's hugely popular Messenger app. This week, Marcus unveiled the next big move for Messenger.

I was reflecting on the demonstrations of Deep Mind against Go champion Lee Se-dol, along with Watson at CeBIT and other artificial intelligence (AI) developments. It soon becomes apparent that we are evolving rapidly to a state where data learning through data analytics will be the battleground. In fact, it's clear that the battle over data is already won by those who have data architectures fit for AI. If you don't recognise this chart, please read the series of blogs I wrote in 2014 about such things. In this chart, I outlined the structure of a bank as front, middle, and back office (or retailer, processor, manufacturer), and that this structure is being attacked by technologies.

Ian Burkhart was 19 years old when he broke his neck diving into shallow water on holiday. Since then, he has been unable to move either of his legs, or his arms below the elbow (read Ian's story here). Now, in a world first, he has regained control of one hand and his fingers using a mind-reading device. In the past few years, we have seen paralysed people walk again with the aid of exoskeletons, and by using recorded brain activity to trigger electric stimulations to the leg muscles. Others have trained paralysed people to control computer cursors and robotic limbs by thought alone.

A recent academic study conducted by researchers from Leiden, Ben-Gurion and Toulouse Universities examined the performance of Cortical.io's Compared to the commonly used word-list method, Semantic Folding proved to have greater predictive power. Its other advantages were speed and ease of use. "Like the human brain, our Semantic Folding engine learns a language and understands the meaning of text by making analogies. Like the brain, it is both efficient and accurate. We are thrilled to see these compelling results confirmed by an independent academic study", comments Francisco Webber, inventor and co-founder of Cortical.io.

While video becomes more important as a digital media type, video data often remains dark to analytics. This webinar demonstrates how IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk together with Watson services begins to unlock the value of video data. Dark Vision is an application that uploads video files or streams to the cloud, transcodes video data, extracts and passes frames through the Watson Image Recognition and the Alchemy Face Recognition services, and generates meta-data to use in categorizing the video data for searchability. In the presentation, Andreas Nauerz introduces the basics of IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk and Frederic Lavigne demonstrates how to create OpenWhisk code to accomplish Dark Vision's application workflow. Maybe you want to do that because a particular team already has developed skills in this area, maybe because they do mobile development or have done mobile development in the past, and now want to outsource computer-intensive tasks.

Cameras and audio equipment are getting better all the time, but mostly through brute force: more pixels, more sensors, and better post-processing. Mammalian eyes and ears beat them handily when it comes to efficiency and the ability to only focus on what's interesting or important. Neuromorphic engineers, who try to mimic the strengths of biological systems in manmade ones, have made big strides in recent years, especially with vision. Researchers have made machine-vision systems that only take pictures of moving objects, for example. Instead of taking many images at a steady, predetermined rate, these kinds of cameras monitor for changes in a scene and only record those.

In a world first, a quadriplegic man can once again move his fingers after a chip was implanted in his brain. Ian Burkhart from Ohio in the US can even move individual fingers to play a guitar-based computer game. The chip reads brain signals, which are interpreted by a computer. It then precisely stimulates his muscles with electricity to restore movement. The researchers hope the technology will eventually help millions of people with paralysis, stroke or brain damage.

David Marcus, who heads Facebook's Messenger platform, tells Jefferson Graham how automated chat bots can improve the shopping and customer service experience, on #TalkingTech. SAN FRANCISCO - Clicking a buy button on a website is so 20th century. Now the next big thing is conversing with a computerized robot. Used by 900 million people, Messenger has a major new look and mission, thanks to former PayPal chief David Marcus, who left the payment giant in 2014 to transform Facebook's hugely popular Messenger app into a commerce engine. This week, Marcus did a major overhaul of Messenger.

David Marcus, who heads Facebook's Messenger platform, tells Jefferson Graham how automated chat bots can improve the shopping and customer service experience, on #TalkingTech. SAN FRANCISCO - Clicking a buy button on a website is so 20th century. Now the next big thing is conversing with a computerized robot. Facebook made a splash here at its F8 conference for developers by showcasing how businesses can participate in Messenger, the 900-million-person-strong communication tool for family and friends. Apps, Messenger chief David Marcus told us, are yesterday, while computerized shopping and customer service assistants are today, and very much tomorrow.