Originating as a BBC radio series in 1978, Douglas Adams's inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon. Douglas wrote five parts from 1979 onwards (the first sold 250,000 in three months), introducing the world to Marvin the Paranoid Android, the computer Deep Thought, space guitarist Hotblack Desiato (named after Adams's local estate agent) and the Guide itself, a remarkably prescient forerunner to the internet. Aldiss's first novel is a tour-de-force of adventure, wonder and conceptual breakthrough. Set aboard a vast generation starship millennia after blast-off, the novel follows Roy Complain on a voyage of discovery from ignorance of his surroundings to some understanding of his small place in the universe. Complain is spiteful and small-minded but grows in humanity as his trek through the ship brings him into contact with giant humans, mutated rats and, ultimately, a wondrous view of space beyond the ship. One of the first attempts to write a comprehensive "future history", the trilogy - which also includes Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953) - is Asimov's version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, set on a galactic scale. Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory with which to combat the fall into barbarianism of the Human Empire, and sets up the Foundation to foster art, science and technology.

Max's comment remains relevant to a great deal of 21st Century AI research in machine vision (i.e. up to 2014 at least), focusing on training machines to attach labels as opposed to understanding structures (I would now add "and processes involving interacting structures"). One of the points he could have made but nowhere seems to have made, is that natural vision systems are mostly concerned with motion and change, including change of shape, and change of viewpoint. The emphasis on static scenes and images may therefore conceal major problems e.g.

The day we can't tell the difference between a human and robot just got a little bit closer. A Turing Test of sorts has been put to humans to see if they could differentiate between their fellow human and non-human combatants in a first-person shooter game. For the first time in the five years that the contest has run, humans couldn't tell the difference. The contest, conceived of and organized by Philip Hingston, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, puts human and computer players on the battlefields of the first-person shooter game UT2004. After a few rounds of combat, the humans have to decide which players are human and which are bots.

An orangutan has been captured performing DIY better than some humans. The incredible new footage reveals a female great ape using a saw to skilfully divide a branch in two. The talented ape uses her right hand to hold the tool and her feet to grip the tree branch like a vice. She even blows away the sawdust to inspect her work like a true craftsman. An orangutan has been captured performing DIY better than some humans.

"Alexa, why are you winning the smart home market?" It seems every appliance that's any appliance is adding Alexa support at CES 2017, giving Amazon a commanding lead in the race to become the de facto smart home standard. As someone who lives in Australia, where Amazon Echo hasn't launched, though, I'm left wondering when we'll get to join Alexa's gang. In the battle to become the brand that's synonymous with the smart home experience, building a global footprint will become important very soon. In a global market, selling to two of 200 countries won't keep you in the driver's seat for long.

Overexploitation of the world's fish stocks is growing at an alarming rate, says the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Nearly 90% are either at or exceeding sustainable capacity, and in less than 10 years, production is set to grow by 17%. One of the keys to sustainable fisheries has been the employ of human monitors to watch what is being scooped up from the sea. In the United States, fishing boats are routinely accompanied by independent observers who track compliance with fishing regulations. In other countries' waters, it's a whole different story, so those government and independent agencies hoping to halt overfishing are turning to some of the same digital tools that let social media sites recognize faces in photos.

A third of the way through a 20-day man vs. machine poker tournament, the artificial intelligence system has the hot hand. As of Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. ET, the humans and the A.I. system, dubbed Libratus, had already played more than 34,000 hands with about 120,000 hands likely by the end of the tournament. The "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante" tournament kicked off Jan. 11 at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. During the tournament, poker pros Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou are playing Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em against Libratus. Libratus pulled ahead early, leading by a little more than $74,000 on the first day of play and by more than twice amount by Day 2. "This is quite nice given that in advance of the event the international betting sites considered us a 4:1 or 5:1 underdog," wrote Tuomas Sandholm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and lead developer on the Libratus system, in an email to Computerworld.

January 18, 2017 --Barren circles dot the dry grasslands across about 1,500 miles of the Namib Desert stretching down the southwestern coast of Africa, emerging, growing, shrinking, and disappearing in lifetimes of 30 to 60 years. The empty patches are accentuated by a rim of particularly tall grasses that ring the circles, which range from 6 feet to 115 feet wide. The fairy circles, as the strange bare soil spots are called, have long puzzled scientists. Although they look a bit like imprints left by massive raindrops, impacting meteors, or as legend would have it, the feet of gods, researchers suspect the pattern may form as a result of a more systematic natural process. But just what that process might be has been the subject of much debate.

Businesses that have adopted artificial intelligence (AI) technologies expect their revenues to increase by 39% and costs to drop by 37% by 2020, according to research, and 64% say their future growth depends on large-scale AI adoption. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

A pioneer in machine learning from the University of Alberta is teaming up with the Royal Bank of Canada on artificial intelligence research. Richard Sutton, a professor at the school's department of computer science and a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, will advise the bank's machine learning research division and collaborate with RBC's second AI research lab, to be located in Edmonton. Sutton specializes in the same branch of machine learning that Google's AlphaGo computer program used, in part, to beat one of the highest-ranking professional players of the board game Go -- until recently, a notoriously difficult game for computers to play. The announcement is the latest in a string of AI-related partnerships, acquisitions and investments that have been struck in Canada in recent months -- the most high-profile of which have involved Facebook and Google, which have been in a fierce competition for access to talent. For over three decades, Sutton has specialized in reinforcement learning. In this branch of machine learning, an algorithm is designed to receive either a reward or penalty based on its behaviour, and learns to make choices that will result in the most reward -- and, hopefully, most desired behaviour -- over time.