In recent years however, information technology has entered the field of international politics gaming and made some major contributions. The most successful international politics games at present are concerned with the personalities of political adversaries. An interesting international politics game could define personality in several variables including concepts like aggressiveness, nastiness, and paranoia. Computer programs would allow then the international politics gamer to vary personalities by ascribing a different numerical value to each of these variables. In this way, an infinite number of different "artificial" personalities can be created by means of using concepts like heuristics, algorithms, fuzzy logic, statistics, neural networks, and virtual reality.

Recent successes in AI have shown that machines can now perform at human levels in many tasks that, just a few years ago, were considered to be decades away, like driving cars, understanding spoken language, and recognizing objects. But these are all tasks where we know what needs to be done, and the machine is just imitating us. What about tasks where the right answers are not known? Can machines be programmed to find solutions on their own, and perhaps even come up with creative solutions that humans would find difficult? The answer is a definite yes!

Of all the fast and powerful computers in the world, our brain remains by far the most impressive. Now an interdisciplinary team of scientists, led by Baylor College of Medicine, aims to reveal the computational building blocks of our brain and use them to create smarter learning machines. To enable this ambitious project, the U.S. government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity(IARPA) has awarded a 21 million contract to an interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists, computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians, led by principal investigator Dr. Andreas Tolias, associate professor of neuroscience at Baylor. The research team includes scientists from Baylor, the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Cornell University, Rice University, the University of Toronto and the University of Tuebingen. The program supporting this research is known as Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) and was envisioned and organized by Jacob Vogelstein, a neuromorphic engineer and program manager with IARPA.

Change of Plans.... We are going to bump this months OC Deep Learning Meetup to Wed. the 13th as several people requested it and no one objected. Plus this gives us the pleasure of hearing from Manuel Beltran Chief Software Architect, Battle Command Systems at Boeing. Mr. Beltran has over 20 years computer engineering experience and has worked as a Knowledge Engineer on various NASA projects, his Expert Systems and Neural Networks have provided many years of safe and successful Space Shuttle launch pad operations. Mr. Beltran also provided Software Engineering leadership, vision, and technical innovation to the US Army's Brigade Combat Team Modernization, formerly known as the Future Combat System. As the Chief Software Architect of the Battle Command System, he has been responsible for the software development of the largest military modernization effort in the history of the US military.

Look closely at what many journalists write about artificial intelligence – from AlphaGo's triumph at the ancient Chinese board game Go to Microsoft's accidentally racist Twitter bot – and you might detect some smugness. Research by Oxford University has predicted that journalism is among the jobs least likely to be replaced by a machine in the near future. And yet, as Columbia University prepares to celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer prize, intelligent robots will publish financial reports, sports commentaries, clickbait and myriad other articles formerly the preserve of trained journalists. "A machine will win a Pulitzer one day," predicts Kris Hammond from Narrative Science, a company that specialises in "natural language generation". "We can tell the stories hidden in data."

When Anne Taylor walks into a room, she wants to know the same things that any person would. Where is there an empty seat? Who is walking up to me, and is that person smiling or frowning? What does that sign say? For Taylor, who is blind, there aren't always easy ways to get this information. Perhaps another person can direct her to her seat, describe her surroundings or make an introduction.

AlphaGo's recent defeat of champion Go player Lee Se-dol has spurred another flurry of articles about AI. Among these was an announcement that Luc Besson will be directing a pilot for a new TV series titled Artificial Intelligence. Bet you can't guess the plot? Well, actually, you probably can: AI escapes the lab, goes AWOL, mayhem ensues. Its creators form a team of special agents to combat the now rogue AI.

As the oracles of Silicon Valley debate whether the latest tech boom is sliding toward bust, there is already talk about what will drive the industry's next growth spurt. The way we use computing is changing, toward a boom (and, if history is any guide, a bubble) in collecting oceans of data in so-called cloud computing centers, then analyzing the information to build new businesses. The terms most often associated with this are "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence," or "A.I." And the creations spawned by this market could affect things ranging from globe-spanning computer systems to how you pay at the cafeteria. "There is going to be a boom for design companies, because there's going to be so much information people have to work through quickly," said Diane B. Greene, the head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an A.I. boom.

It's not crazy to think investors and drivers will witness more innovation and change in the automotive industry over the next two decades than what took place over the last century. Technology and smartphones are enabling businesses like Uber to thrive seemingly overnight. Young people moving back into an urban lifestyle are creating opportunities for companies to think differently about how people travel on a daily basis. But perhaps the most intriguing storyline of all is the future of driverless cars. Here are three analysts with the reasons they believe driverless cars are here to stay.

The first bot I ever befriended went by the name of GooglyMinotaur. The Minotaur appeared in 2001 to promote Amnesiac, the latest album from Radiohead, which was and still is my favorite band. I happily chatted with the Minotaur about Radiohead history, information about the band's tour, and the MP3s it offered for download. The Minotaur was popular among fans like me: 1 million people added it as a friend, and in its lifetime it sent more than 60 million messages. But the Minotaur died a few months after it appeared, along with the rest of the era's bots. The entire field seemed dormant for more than a decade.