Chess is a complicated game. It's a game of strategy between two opponents, but with no hidden information and all of the potential moves known by both players at the outset. With each turn, players communicate their intent and try to anticipate the possible countermoves. The ability to envision several moves in advance is a recipe for victory, and one that mathematicians and logicians have long found intriguing. Despite some early mechanical chess-playing machines--and at least one chess-playing hoax--mechanized chess play remained hypothetical until the advent of digital computing.

Meditation and mindfulness have been around for thousands of years. But the advent of smartphones and computers led to a new phenomenon: the mindfulness app. There are a few to choose from, including the punchy, assertive 10% Happier, the elegant and placid Calm and the first app that really brought mindfulness to our phones, Headspace. Andy Puddicombe, a former Buddhist monk who went on to run a meditation clinic in London, met a new business partner, Richard Pierson, and launched Headspace in 2010. The company began as an events organisation and led to the now-ubiquitous app in 2012.

Too many cities are built around cars rather than people. Sidewalk Labs, an offshoot of Google's parent company Alphabet, wants its smart neighborhood in Toronto to be different. It's considering a so-called superblock concept, modeled after Barcelona's, that bundles smaller streets together and limits vehicles to the perimeter. The smaller lanes inside each superblock would then become safer, quieter spaces for pedestrians and cyclists. Sidewalk Labs wants to go a step further, though, with real-time traffic monitoring and movable street furniture.

Welcome to Engadget's newest series, Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories. Modern tech culture has long been enamored with the mythos of the lone genius achieving superhuman status (a la The Matrix). Whether it's Jack Dorsey's self flagellating dietary restrictions, Peter Thiel's obsession with "young blood" transfusions, or Tim Ferris' outright maniacal 4-hour self improvement regimens, if you're a wealthy white guy in Silicon Valley and not trying to live forever, you're doing it wrong. But for all the Bond villain-esque grifters selling the promise of eternal youth in 12 easy steps, a dedicated cadre of technologists have spent years investigating how we might actually achieve Ray Kurtweil's predicted singularity.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Soft-bubble, "a highly compliant dense geometry tactile sensor for robot manipulation," is a sort of combined gripper and 3D camera that uses a soft membrane to grasp and image objects at the same time. HAPS Mobile, a SoftBank-backed company, is developing a high-altitude pseudo satellite: a massive, solar-powered, long endurance drone that acts like a much cheaper and more versatile satellite over a smaller area.

As the world races to deploy speedy 5G mobile networks on the ground, some companies remain focused on floating cell towers in the sky. During the final session of the sixth annual Brooklyn 5G Summit on Thursday, Silicon Valley and telecom leaders discussed whether aerial drones and balloons could finally begin providing commercial mobile phone and Internet service from the air. That same day, Alphabet subsidiary Loon, a balloon-focused graduate of the Google X research lab, unveiled a strategic partnership with Softbank's HAPSMobile to leverage both solar-powered balloons and drones to expand mobile Internet coverage and aid in deploying 5G networks. No high-altitude network connectivity services have taken off commercially so far, but some Brooklyn 5G Summit speakers were optimistic that it would happen soon. "The opportunity is in our hands in terms of truly leveraging 5G in conjunction with the massive paradigm shift when it comes to UAS--drones--and also satellites," said Volker Ziegler, CTO at Nokia Bell Labs.

Artificial-intelligence researcher Oren Etzioni has suggestions for keeping enough AI faculty members around to train the next generation.Credit: Bret Hartman/TED Oren Etzioni is chief executive of the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington, and is on leave from the nearby University of Washington. He offers some recommendations for how to stem the outflow of artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers from academia to industry -- a loss that is damaging academia's ability to teach incoming undergraduates. It is a very sizeable trend for fresh PhD graduates and faculty members. In machine learning, you see some significant departures. Industry compensation packages are highly variable.

In early March, Pittsburgh Mayor William Peduto signed an executive order mandating that firms testing self-driving vehicles submit materials outlining their testing methods every six months to the city's newly formed Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI). Findings from the first of these were quietly published this week, compiled in a survey ("Self-Driving Vehicle Testing in Pittsburgh Summary of Findings") to be issued once a year. According to the report, five companies -- Aptiv, Argo AI, Aurora, Carnegie Mellon University, and Uber -- are testing 55 driverless cars in 32 of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods and suburbs, with the greatest concentration in the city's Strip District and Lower Lawrenceville. The test vehicles range from modified BMW 540is and Chrysler Pacifica PHEVs to Ford Fusion Hybrids, Lincoln MKZs, Cadillac SRXs, and Volvo XC90s, all of which contain no fewer than five disengagement mechanisms including buttons in the consoles and steering wheels. Most of the cars fall under the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE)'s level 4 designation, meaning that they're capable of performing all driving functions autonomously under certain conditions, and they drive on public roads mostly during weekdays (both during the day and at night) with occasional testing on weekends "only during favorable weather conditions."

Nvidia Senior Director of Enterprise David Hogan spoke at this year's AI Expo about how the company is seeing artificial intelligence adoption making an impact. In the keynote session, titled'What is the true adoption of AI', Hogan provided real-world examples of how the technology is being used and enabled by Nvidia's GPUs. But first, he highlighted the momentum we're seeing in AI. "Many governments have announced investments in AI and how they're going to position themselves," comments Hogan. "Countries around the world are starting to invest in very large infrastructures." The world's most powerful supercomputers are powered by Nvidia GPUs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is proving to be a double-edged sword. While this can be said of most new technologies, both sides of the AI blade are far sharper, and neither is well understood. These technologies are starting to improve our lives in myriad ways, from simplifying our shopping to enhancing our healthcare experiences. Their value to businesses also has become undeniable: nearly 80 percent of executives at companies that are deploying AI recently told us that they're already seeing moderate value from it. Although the widespread use of AI in business is still in its infancy and questions remain open about the pace of progress, as well as the possibility of achieving the holy grail of "general intelligence," the potential is enormous.