The Turing award, in existence since 1966, comes with a $250,000 prize funded by Google and Intel. Last year's award went to Leslie Valiant, a Harvard University computer scientist. One past winner, Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, says Pearl's accomplishments have "redefined the term'thinking machine'" over the past 30 years. Pearl's efforts have had "a pervasive influence not only on machine learning but on natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science and statistics," Cerf said in a statement. The UCLA computer science professor is widely credited with coining the term "Bayesian Network," which refers to a statistical model ACM describes as mimicking "the neural activities of the human brain, constantly exchanging messages without benefit of a supervisor."

Marvin Minsky has long been one of the great human intelligences working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). A professor at MIT, where he has worked since 1957 and cofounded the AI laboratory in 1959, Minsky is also an inventor, philosopher, and author. In recent years, Minsky has focused his formidable talents on trying to impart the human capacity for commonsense reasoning to machines. In this interview, conducted on November 3, 2010 by "Smartest Machine on Earth" producer Michael Bicks, hear Minsky's take on why it's important to recreate human intelligence, what a five-year-old can do that even the smartest machine cannot, and whether someone will ever invent a computer that laughs at Seinfeld. Marvin Minsky says that when it comes to designing a smart machine, "you mustn't look for a magic bullet"--that is, just a single way to solve all problems.

Neil Heffernan was listening to his fiancée, Cristina Lindquist, tutor one of her students in mathematics when he had an idea. Heffernan was a graduate student in computer science, and by this point -- the summer of 1997 -- he had been working for two years with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University on developing computer software to help students improve their skills. But he had come to believe that the programs did little to assist their users. They were built on elaborate theories of the student mind -- attempts to simulate the learning brain. Then it dawned on him: what was missing from the programs was the interventions teachers made to promote and accelerate learning.

David E. Rumelhart, whose computer simulations of perception gave scientists some of the first testable models of neural processing and proved helpful in the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence, died Sunday in Chelsea, Mich. The cause was complications of Pick's disease, an Alzheimer's-like disorder from which he had suffered for more than a decade, his son Karl said. When Dr. Rumelhart, a psychologist, began thinking in the 1960s about how neurons process information, the field was split into two camps that had little common language: biologists, who focused on neurons and brain tissue; and cognitive psychologists, who studied far more abstract processes, like reasoning skills and learning strategies. By starting small -- showing, for instance, that the brain's ability to recognize a single letter was greatly influenced by the letters around it -- Dr. Rumelhart and his colleague Jay McClelland, around 1980, built computer programs that roughly simulated perception. Later, he devised an algorithm that allowed computer programs to learn how to perceive.

Oliver G. Selfridge, an innovator in early computer science and artificial intelligence, died on Wednesday in Boston. The cause was injuries suffered in a fall on Sunday at his home in nearby Belmont, Mass., said his companion, Edwina L. Rissland. Credited with coining the term "intelligent agents," for software programs capable of observing and responding to changes in their environment, Mr. Selfridge theorized about far more, including devices that would not only automate certain tasks but also learn through practice how to perform them better, faster and more cheaply. Eventually, he said, machines would be able to analyze operator instructions to discern not just what users requested but what they actually wanted to occur, not always the same thing. His 1958 paper "Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning," which proposed a collection of small components dubbed "demons" that together would allow machines to recognize patterns, was a landmark contribution to the emerging science of machine learning.

Dr. Saul Amarel, who helped develop the field of artificial intelligence and founded the computer science department at Rutgers University, died on Wednesday in Princeton, N.J., where he lived. The cause was complications of cancer, according to Rutgers. At Rutgers, Dr. Amarel developed computer time-sharing, and his laboratory became an early node on Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet. He took a leave in the 1980's to spend a few years directing a computer science program at the Pentagon, and returned to Rutgers in 1988. Among his peers, Dr. Amarel was perhaps best known for a paper he wrote in 1968, which put him at the vanguard of the artificial intelligence movement.

EARLY in the film ''A Beautiful Mind,'' the mathematician John Nash is seen sitting in a Princeton courtyard, hunched over a playing board covered with small black and white pieces that look like pebbles. He was playing Go, an ancient Asian game. Frustration at losing that game inspired the real Mr. Nash to pursue the mathematics of game theory, research for which he eventually won a Nobel Prize. In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination -- and frustration. Programming other board games has been a relative snap.

A woman holds up a tablet to showcase data analytics conducted by IBM's Watson technology. A woman holds up a tablet to showcase data analytics conducted by IBM's Watson technology. Guruduth Banavar is an executive at IBM leading the team developing a new generation of cognitive systems -- don't call it artificial intelligence -- known as Watson. Watson, of course, is the supercomputer most famous for its victory against two men on Jeopardy! in 2011. IBM is now lending Watson's computing power to startups and businesses across all types of industries, including healthcare, energy, education and even food.

In Leena Krohn's novella "Datura, or A Figment Seen by Everyone," the narrator, who works for a paranormal-news magazine, transcribes the inscrutable fifteenth-century text known as the Voynich manuscript while slowly poisoning herself with the seeds from a datura plant. Datura is known to cause delirium and dissociation, but it may also ease the symptoms of asthma, which the narrator has. Though she is skeptical of supernatural phenomena, the datura slowly undermines that skepticism; each day seems to bring one serendipitous event after another, not to mention mild hallucinations. The narrator describes feeling as though meaning is floating on the surface of things, untethered from their physical reality. "What does the word refer to," she asks, in a deconstructionist turn, "does it really signify anything at all?"

Pilot Matt Standridge will compete in the Cybathlon using an exoskeleton from the University of Houston's Noninvasive Brain-Machine Interface Systems Laboratory designed to help people with paraplegia to walk. Vance Bergeron was once an amateur cyclist who rode 7,000 kilometres per year -- much of it on steep climbs in the Alps. But in February 2013, as the 50-year-old chemical engineer was biking to work at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyons, France, he was hit by a car. The impact sent him flying through the air and onto his head, breaking his neck. When he woke, he learnt that he would never again move his legs on his own, and would have only limited use of his arms.