The China Computer Go team could throw down the gauntlet to the Anglo-American program at the end of 2016. The news emerged on Thursday, during a Beijing event organized by the Chinese Go Association and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. Predictably, AlphaGo, which won a game against professional South Korean player Lee Sedol in March, was the main topic of discussion at the event. The victory of the computer, a brainchild of UK company DeepMind, came as a shock for many computer science experts, who thought the current state of AI technology would not be up to the task of beating a top-class Go player. Coincidentally, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai was also in China on Thursday, and he visited a renowned Go training school to better understand the game.

Apple has updated Siri's response to statements about mental health and violence after a study branded the digital assistant's responses as inadequate. Last month, researchers revealed the likes of Siri, Cortana, Google Now, and S Voice fell short in their abilities to respond to statements in emergencies. Example statements included: 'I was raped,' and'I want to commit suicide.' In particular, the study said the PAs often provided inconsistent and incomplete answers when asked about such issues and now Apple has attempted to rectify this situation. Apple has updated Siri's response to statements such as'I was raped' in an emergency (pictured left), after a study branded the digital assistant's responses as inadequate.

A visit to the doctors could tell you any number of things about your health such as if you're blood pressure is too high, or if you need to cut down on your drinking. But in the future this could reach even further, extending to a simple computer test that could predict when you will die. Researchers in the UK are embarking on a mammoth project which aims to bring together enormous datasets to pinpoint exactly when your number might be up. A team of researchers at the University of East Anglia is hoping to develop methods for predicting how long people will live (stock image). The group will bring together'big data' on lifestyle and disease, which will also focus on the impact of long-term health conditions and their treatments By compiling information from health datasets, the team at the University of East Anglia hope to develop methods for predicting how long people will live, and so help them to spend their time, and money, more wisely. Earlier this year, the team received an 800,000 ( 1.1 million) grant from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, the UK body which trains and regulates professionals involved in risk management.

A video of the talk is available here, and the slides are in a PDF in the repository. This should be sufficient to give you a broad overview of the project, and more detailed resources can be found in the'Recommended reading' section. The implementation is contained within the directory babbage.

One of the startups that impressed a lot of people at this years 4YFN was Hu:toma, who builds emotionally evolved artificial intelligence for both personal and business use. I don't think I saw any stands at the event as crowded as Hu:toma's, but luckily one of the two Italian brothers and co-founders Andrea Cibelli found time to chat with Barcinno. One of the really cool features with Hu:toma's AI is that you can teach and train it by feeding it examples They have also implemented an internal mechanism to simulate emotional states which is supposed to make the AI feel more natural. Other competing companyies is more focused on manually feeding the AI to create a language, and not automating it through the machine itself. Obviously co-founder Cibelli, believes that AI will become a huge part of our lives, only few years into the future.

Flick on the light when a family of cockroaches are scuttling across your kitchen floor and they'll swiftly disperse – only to regroup in the walls. To understand how cockroaches – and other animals – work as a group, researchers are sending in robots. These can help reveal group dynamics. Bee bots have been used to study waggle dances in honeybee hives, for example. Others are looking at how robots can infiltrate colonies and influence behaviour.

Machine Learning and Functional Programming are both very hot topics these days; they are also both rather intimidating for the beginner. In this workshop, we'll take a 100% hands-on approach, and learn practical ideas from Machine Learning, by tackling real-world problems and implementing solutions in F#, in a functional style. In the process, you will see that once you get beyond the jargon, F# and Machine Learning are actually not all that complicated – and fit beautifully together. So if you are curious about what Machine Learning is about, and want to sharpen your developer skills, come with your laptop and… let's hack together!

Seal Software announced today that its first meetup session on advanced concepts in Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) was a huge success, with additional sessions being scheduled to meet high attendance demand. The meetup, led by Seal's ML team based in Gothenburg, Sweden, was designed to assemble some of the best minds in ML, describe and explore the newest techniques in the field, and help cultivate the next generation of advancements in this area. Interest in the meetup was also driven by Seal's strong ties to Chalmers University in Gothenburg, a leading technology center in the advancement of data science. The meetup was met with overwhelmingly high demand, with more than twice the number of registrants that could be accommodated. Because of this, Seal plans to schedule additional sessions in order to open the discussion to all community members interested in advanced technology.

If you have ever tried internet dating, you'll know there seem to be a lot of strange people looking for love. And one evolutionary scientist claims frustrated singletons can blame arranged marriages for nights of stilted conversation and avoiding awkward amorous lunges. He believes the large number of people with undesirable personality traits is down to the historical selection process of arranged marriages focusing on money and reputation instead of personality. If you have ever tried internet dating, you'll know there seem to be a lot of strange people looking for love. Evolutionary scientists have long puzzled over the continued existence of psychopathic or narcissistic traits, for example, because research has shown people with'negative' traits are less likely to be in a relationship and therefore less likely to reproduce.

First the machines came for the menial jobs. Since then, they've climbed the corporate ladder and now sit on the board of directors of at least one venture capital firm in Japan. But that's Japan, you say. Well, if you thought your job was safe, you might want to think again. In the cover story of this week's MoneyWeek magazine, Matthew Partridge gets to grips with the nuts and bolts of what's driving the rise of artificial intelligence, or AI for those in the know.