The domain of computer chess playing is suggested as a general means for quantifying the distance by which we have not yet achieved our stated objectives in artificial intelligence. The game of chess traditionally has been considered, at least in Western societies, as the epitome of intellectual skill and accomplishment. Herbert Simon and later John McCarthy, among the cofounders of AI, have referred to chess as the Drosophila of AI, speaking metaphorically about the importance for genetics of Thomas Morgan's early research with fruit flies, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1933. This metaphor is appropriate, since the quantification of human chess play has been institutionalized over the last 40 years by giving every tournament player a numerical rating, a metric that also can be used to measure progress in machine performance. In 1993, world champion Gary Kasparov unilaterally created his own world chess organization (The Professional Chess Association or PCA) with the aim of displacing The International Chess Federation (FIDE), which traditionally has supervised tournaments for the world title.

Machine learning has become a buzzword in the media these days. Recently Science magazine published a cover paper on Human-level concept learning through probabilistic program induction and shortly after Nature magazine devoted its cover story to AlphaGo, an AI program that defeated European Go Championship winner. Late on Tuesday night, Google's DeepMind AI group will play one of the world's best human Go players, Lee Se-dol of South Korea. The game will be live streamed on YouTube, and the stream is embedded at the end of this story. Many are now discussing the potential of artificial intelligence, asking questions such as "Can machines learn like a human?", "Will artificial intelligence surpass human intelligence?", To answer such questions, InfoQ interviewed Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber, Scientific Director of The Swiss AI Lab IDSIA.

Miguel Ferrer, an actor with a long list of credits ranging from "Twin Peaks" to his current role on CBS' "NCIS: Los Angeles," died of cancer on Thursday. A fixture on TV and in movies since the 1980s, Ferrer's reputation as a scene-stealer began with 1987's "RoboCop," where he played Bob Morton, the conniving corporate executive who designed the film's title cyborg. His other landmark role was as FBI agent Albert Rosenfield in David Lynch's landmark series "Twin Peaks," along with its corresponding film, "Fire Walk With Me." Ferrer reprised the role in the upcoming return of the series, which is set to debut in May on Showtime. "Great talent, better man," wrote "Twin Peaks" co-creator Mark Frost on Twitter. "Working & writing for him was a highlight in every part of my life."

John McCarthy, the inventor of programming language Lisp and a pioneer in "artificial intelligence" technology, died Monday night. Mashable reports that McCarthy was also one of the first people to propose "selling computing power through a utility business model," in 1961. Tributes to McCarthy poured in Tuesday, some from posters on Usenet, where McCarthy was an active presence, or from technology writers like Steven Levy, who wrote on Twitter: "Broke news to Siri that John McCarthy... died. She took it well but we humans will miss him." McCarthy's Web site also has a wide following.

ROB MILNE earned international respect for his innovative work in adapting artificial intelligence (AI) as a practical aid to industry and in bridging the gap between the research laboratory and the factory floor. The company he founded at Livingston near Edinburgh, at the heart of the "Silicon Glen", reversed the initials AI to create Intelligent Applications. The projects and software it produced won many awards for innovation and excellence. Milne's devotion to computer technology was matched by a love of mountains and the physical achievement of reaching the highest summits.

Donald Michie was born in Rangoon on November 11 1923, the son of James Michie and the former Marjorie Crain. From Rugby he won a classical scholarship to Balliol, becoming - according to wartime colleagues - "curator of the Balliol Book of Bawdy Verse". In 1942 he was recruited to Bletchley Park. He was put into Hut F, working to crack the Wehrmacht's "Tunny" machine, which encoded material more sensitive than that carried by the now celebrated "Enigma". The team's success gave the Allies access for the first time to German army situation reports in the run-up to D-Day, with invaluable insights into troop dispositions in France.

Mr Gregory was a pioneer of human psychology, and made significant advances in the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence. Born in London in 1923, he was the son of astronomer Christopher Gregory. Mr Gregory spent five years in the RAF during the Second World War, after being called up at the age of 18. After exhibiting obvious academic talent the RAF offered Mr Gregory a scholarship to study philosophy and experimental psychology at Downing College, Cambridge and after proving himself a successful scientist and inventor he moved to Edinburgh, where he took up a post as professor of bionics. There he co-founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, the first of its kind in the UK.

"I like to think that since I was about 19, I have studied human decision-making and problem-solving," Dr. Simon said in a Post-Gazette interview last fall. He earned a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago in 1943 and took teaching positions at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the newly established industrial administration school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

Dr. Engelbart died on Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton, Calif. His wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure. Computing was in its infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Someone would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers. Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in science fiction.

Psychological research was in a kind of rut in 1955 when George A. Miller, a professor at Harvard, delivered a paper titled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," which helped set off an explosion of new thinking about thinking and opened a new field of research known as cognitive psychology. The dominant form of psychological study at the time, behaviorism, had rejected Freud's theories of "the mind" as too intangible, untestable and vaguely mystical. Its researchers instead studied behavior in laboratories, observing and recording test subjects' responses to carefully administered stimuli. Dr. Miller, who died on July 22 at his home in Plainsboro, N.J., at the age of 92, revolutionized the world of psychology by showing in his paper that the human mind, though invisible, could also be observed and tested in the lab. "George Miller, more than anyone else, deserves credit for the existence of the modern science of mind," the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker said in an interview.