If ever there was an event specifically designed to send the regular Sydney Opera House clientele into a near-fatal frenzy of monocle popping, it was this one: a video game festival hosted at Australia's most famous cultural icon. But whatever misgivings one may have about Minecraft at the Opera House, when I arrive the mood is buoyant. More still stand in line to meet the "celebrities of Minecraft" – a concept that would be impossible to even begin to explain to someone 10 years ago. Others are marshalled into groups, waiting side stage in the concert hall to take part in Australia's first Minecraft tournament. The parents take in the scene with an air of contented bafflement. Their confusion is understandable: on the surface, Minecraft as a popular game, let alone an international phenomenon, is hard to explain.

An Australian startup revealed its flagship product, an earpiece that can interpret 8 different languages in real-time, at a United Nations event in Switzerland on Friday. Lingmo International, a startup based in West Gosford north of Sydney, launched its TranslateOne2One earpiece at the UN's Artificial Intelligence for Good Summit in Geneva, revealing that IBM Watson machine learning technology had been used for its algorithms. Traditionally, converting one language to another orally in real-time is called "interpreting" whereas the term "translation" is reserved for processing text across languages with some delay. Lingmo founder Danny May, however, describes his product as performing "translation in real-time". And what I mean by independent is that it doesn't require any connectivity to your phone by Bluetooth or wi-fi.

A species of cuckoo appears to have learned how to use its beak to mimic the teeth chattering of wild pig-like animals called peccaries in order to ward off predators. The ground cuckoo, found in forests in Central and South America, often follow herds of peccaries to feed on the insects disturbed as they walk through leaf litter. Scientists have spotted that the birds use their beaks to sound like the teeth clacks the peccaries make to scare away large predatory cats. Last week, scientists found that parrots can use sticks to create drumming music in a similar way to humans. Wild palm cockatoos were filmed using sticks and seed pods to create rhythmic sounds as part of a complex mating ritual which also includes screeching, head bobbing and blushing, according to researchers.

SummerSlam is still more than a month away, but WWE has its biggest pay-per-view since WrestleMania 33 set for Sunday night. Great Balls of Fire 2017 features a stacked card with several intriguing matches. It'd be stunning to see Joe beat Lesnar and win his first title on the main roster. That doesn't mean it's not a highly anticipated match, and the build towards Sunday's main event has been better than any of Lesnar's recent feuds. Even if Joe does get pinned to end the PPV, he should find himself near the top of the card at SummerSlam because of what he's done in the weeks leading up to this WWE Universal Championship Match.

Forecasting the weather is notoriously difficult, but scientists are using the latest in computer technology to make the process more accurate. By using massive amounts of data, they hope to be able to predict possible weather patterns with greater certainty. If their efforts prove successful, it could enable meteorologists to foresee major events years, or even decades, in advance. This could have enormous life saving potential in the case of extreme weather, like hurricanes, droughts and floods. Experts from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology are using computer modelling to analyse vast amounts of information about the planet's climate.

Trade unions have vowed to oppose any move by employers to use technological advances in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence as tools to exploit workers. Unions also pledged to fight any Government plan to restrict the right to strike in some essential services, as proposed recently by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. The biennial conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in Belfast also passed a motion calling for the Government to introduce legislation to give union officials the right to enter workplaces to represent, organise and recruit workers. In an address to the conference, Ictu general secretary Patricia King also urged the Government to scrap the existing reduced VAT rate for the hotel and food services sector, which she described as "completely untenable". She said three-quarters of all workers in the accommodation and food services sector earned less than €400 per week.

Growing concerns about how artificial intelligence (AI) makes decisions has inspired U.S. researchers to make computers explain their "thinking." "Computers are going to become increasingly important parts of our lives, if they aren't already, and the automation is just going to improve over time, so it's increasingly important to know why these complicated systems are making the decisions that they are," assistant professor of computer science at the University of California Irvine, Sameer Singh, told CTV's Your Morning on Tuesday. Singh explained that, in almost every application of machine learning and AI, there are cases where the computers do something completely unexpected. "Sometimes it's a good thing, it's doing something much smarter than we realize," he said. Such was the case with the Microsoft AI chatbot, Tay, which became racist in less than a day. Another high-profile incident occurred in 2015, when Google's photo app mistakenly labelled a black couple as gorillas.

It can build an entire house in just two days - and never takes tea breaks. An Australian firm has revealed that construction giant Caterpillar has backed its Hadrian X giant truck mounted building robot that can lay 1,000 bricks an hour, glueing them into place as it goes. The $2m deal means the robot, which can work 24 hours day, and finish an entire house in just two days, is a step closer to appearing on building sites around the world. Mounted on the back of a truck, Hadrian X is simply driven onto a building site, and can put down 1,000 bricks an hour using a 30m boom, allowing it to stay in a single position while it builds. The two companies will collaborate on the development, manufacturing, sales and services of the bricklaying technology, with a newly established strategic alliance board determining the best ways to get Hadrian into the hands of construction customers in different countries.

When a group of museums and researchers in the Netherlands unveiled a portrait entitled The Next Rembrandt, it was something of a tease to the art world. It wasn't a long lost painting but a new artwork generated by a computer that had analysed thousands of works by the 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. The computer used something called machine learning to analyse and reproduce technical and aesthetic elements in Rembrandt's works, including lighting, colour, brush-strokes and geometric patterns. The result is a portrait produced based on the styles and motifs found in Rembrandt's art but produced by algorithms. This is just one example in a growing body of works generated by computers.

Despite the massively larger size of the Google Home speaker, the winner of "who can actually hear a user" is the Echo Dot, which was able to hear me from farther away and without me having to look at it. After seeing the poor feedback of Watson in Bridge Crew, I decided to take my four digital assistants for a spin. After 21 questions across four assistants, I learned that Alexa cannot give basic information about Amazon Prime videos, none of them can properly understand which movie you're looking for information for, and none of them can actually recommend stuff. Also, Google still needs to learn how to round up. I also learned I'm going to need a bigger set of questions. First, the purpose of this test is to test the assistants on the one skill that is a must-have for a disembodied speaker: Information retrieval and processing. This is not a comprehensive test, but is indicative of the types of questions that one might ask based on conversation, i.e. two or more people are having a conversation and they reach a question that needs an answer. To begin with, I summarise the results, mostly for fun. After that, you can browse what I found the most interesting 40 questions, and the varied (or non-varied) answers offered by each assistant for those. This piece is not intended to be illustrative on who is the "best" assistant.