Instead, what captured viewers' attention most was Alibaba Group's artificial intelligence program, which made its global debut on the program to predict the series finalists and winner. Named "Ai," the system got every one of its algorithm-induced guesses right. I Am Singer, broadcast by Hunan TV, has been one of China's top-rated shows since its debut in 2013. During the show's four-hour season finale on Friday, Alibaba's Ai analyzed various factors in real time, such as the popularity of the songs contestants performed, their pitch and energy onstage, lyrical content and audience feedback. Meanwhile, the show's in-house audience of 500, whose vote determined the real winner, deliberated separately.

The bad news is, Japan is beset by seemingly insoluble problems. The good news is the word "seemingly." No nation whose rise to economic superpowerdom began a bare decade after being bombed to rubble in history's most destructive war will ever find anything truly "insoluble." Give it 34 years, says Clyde Prestowitz. His name rings bells in Japan -- alarm bells mostly, because Prestowitz, an American labor economist who served in the 1980s as economic adviser to the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, earned notoriety here as a prime "Japan basher."

Recent events suggest that in the next 5 to 10 years, robots will be prevalent in society, serving humans in areas that 10 years ago seemed impossible. Governed by artificial intelligence (AI) and policies we put in place, robots will be helpers in our daily routines. From shopping, driving, cooking, cleaning to looking after people and animals and replicating advanced tasks we model for them, robots will serve us in a large variety of ways. Humans' role in the workforce will change as we seek to differentiate ourselves from AI in order to show our worth. What will humans add to the equation and where will we add value – those are questions we must consider now.

AI advances can use predictive image processing tools to restore ancient texts and glyphs that have been erased. Likewise, machine learning algorithms can match myriad characters to identify specific handwriting, similar to how digital signatures are verified. "The medium is very deteriorated and so is the writing," Arie Shaus, a Tel Aviv University mathematician, told Gizmodo. Shaus is studying biblical artifacts using AI-aided tools to determine the extent of literacy in ancient times. In fact, Shaus is just one of the growing number of researchers who use machine learning software to plot the timeline of the Bible's compilation.

People have an upper hand over artificial intelligence (AI) when it concerns intuitive thinking and solving complex science problems, according to a new study. In the past few decades, the progress in science and technology have enabled scientists to develop AI that beats people at their own games, however the new discovery reveals a different angle. Associate Professor Jacob Sherson from the Aarhus University (AU) in Denmark led a team of researchers to create a quantum computing game based around complex theoretical science. Later on, it was found that computerized numerical optimization failed to find solutions for the tough problems associated with quantum computing tasks, whereas the human players were successful at it. "The big surprise we had was that some of the players actually had solutions that were of higher quality and of shorter duration than any computer algorithms could find," Jacob Sherson said.

In a milestone for artificial intelligence, a computer has beaten a human champion at a strategy game that requires "intuition" rather than brute processing power to prevail, its makers said Wednesday. Dubbed AlphaGo, the system honed its own skills through a process of trial and error, playing millions of games against itself until it was battle-ready, and surprised even its creators with its prowess. "AlphaGo won five-nil, and it was stronger than perhaps we were expecting," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence (AI) company. A computer defeating a professional human player at the 3,000-year-old Chinese board game known as Go, was thought to be about a decade off. The clean-sweep victory over three-time European Go champion Fan Hui "signifies a major step forward in one of the great challenges in the development of artificial intelligence--that of game-playing," the British Go Association said in a statement.

With the swift acceleration of artificial intelligence and automated technology, there are growing concerns around the development of so-called killer robots. Unlike drones and other technologies that are controlled remotely by humans, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) could operate independently in military missions. Proponents say with proper safeguards it could actually save lives, but critics say they will lead to an arms race and even threaten humanity. Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan of Non-Violence International said while automated machines may work well on factory floors, they have no place on the battlefield. "War is an unstructured space," she said.

At the annual NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced that Azure Media Services will be receiving a host of new features and will even be taking advantage of its machine learning services. Azure Media Services is a collection of cloud-based tools for video workflows and the company intends to make these tools smarter to help users create premium video content more easily. Microsoft will be adding face detection to Media Services through its Face API. The company has decided to go a step further though and will also use the Emotion API from Cognitive Services to detect the emotions of the people who appear in a video. This feature will be useful when it comes to discerning the level of interest of an audience during debates or keynotes.

McCann Erickson Japan has created and appointed the world's first AI robot creative director, AI-CD?. The robot, which will provide creative direction for commercials then evaluate and gain learnings, will attend McCann's new employee welcoming ceremony on 1 April along other college graduates. AI-CD? was developed by'McCann Millennials' staff born between 1980 and 2000, and draws from a database of tagged and analysed TV commercials from winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commercial Confederation's annual CM Festival over the last decade. "Our team didn't have a creative director, so we thought, why not create one ourselves with artificial intelligence?" said McCann Millennials founder and McCann Japan creative planner Shun Matsuzaka. "That's how the Creative Genome Project got started. Our hope is for our AI creative director to work on many projects, gain experience, and to grow into a world-class creative director that will leave a mark in the advertising industry."

I recently talked about the oncoming internet developments that follow the Internet of Things, from the internet on demand (3D and 4D printing) to the internet of robots. A colleague came up afterwards and said I was daft to talk about robots. "It's science fiction," he claimed. I disagreed, as science fiction is rapidly becoming fact. I was reminded of this while listening to some guy called Brett King talking about his new book Augmented at the Meftech conference this week.