Take a three-year-old to the zoo, and she intuitively knows that the long-necked creature nibbling leaves is the same thing as the giraffe in her picture book. That superficially easy feat is in reality quite sophisticated. The cartoon drawing is a frozen silhouette of simple lines, while the living animal is awash in color, texture, movement and light. It can contort into different shapes and looks different from every angle. Humans excel at this kind of task.

Cadillac's first whack at autonomous driving technology will arrive later than planned, the company said this week. In September 2014, GM CEO Mary Barra said Super Cruise, which would let your Cadillac do the driving on the highway, would appear in the fall of 2016. That timeline, Automotive News reports, has slipped to some time in 2017, and Cadillac confirmed the feature won't be in the CT6 when it goes on sale later this year. Super Cruise doesn't do much. It maintains a safe speed and keeps you in your lane.

Mark Zuckerberg recently handpicked the longtime NYU professor to run Facebook's new artificial intelligence lab. The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society just gave him its prestigious Neural Network Pioneer Award, in honor of his work on deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence meant to more closely mimic the human brain. And, perhaps most of all, deep learning has suddenly spread across the commercial tech world, from Google to Microsoft to Baidu to Twitter, just a few years after most AI researchers openly scoffed at it. All of these tech companies are now exploring a particular type of deep learning called convolutional neural networks, aiming to build web services that can do things like automatically understand natural language and recognize images. At China's Baidu, they drive a new visual search engine.

Dr. Hodes was at the forefront of computer-related research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Institutes of Health. While working toward his doctorate in mathematic logic at MIT from 1957 to 1962, he studied under two founders of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. Dr. Hodes was a member of the artificial intelligence group of the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics and did pioneering work in the development of the computer programming language LISP, which was used in artificial intelligence research. He also is credited with being one of the first people to recognize that logic could be used as a programming language. In 1966, Dr. Hodes joined NIH and worked in the artificial intelligence laboratory before moving to the National Cancer Institute.

While working in his native Poland in the 1960s, Dr. Michalski devised an early computer system that could recognize handwriting. After coming to the United States in 1970, he expanded the field of machine learning, creating applications in which computers could execute a form of reasoning, drawing conclusions from information supplied to them. "He was a pioneer in this field," said James S. Trefil, a GMU physicist and writer. Dr. Michalski's specialty of machine learning is similar to but distinct from artificial intelligence. The underlying purpose of much of his work was to use computers to recognize patterns that could ease the decision-making process in seemingly unrelated systems.

Before Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" -- programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a "high-level" programming language because it abstracted that work -- it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own. The breakthrough earned Mr. Backus the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the industry's highest accolades. The citation praised his "profound, influential, and lasting contributions." Mr. Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering. "Much of my work has come from being lazy," Mr. Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979.

We've already heard of all the nasty consequences that could occur if the pace of global climate change doesn't abate by the year 2050 -- we could see wars over water, massive food scarcity, and the extinction of once populous species. Now add to the mix a potentially new wrinkle on the abrupt and irreversible changes – superintelligent robots would be just about ready to take over from humanity in the event of any mass extinction event impacting the planet. In fact, according to a mind-blowing research paper published in mid-August by computer science researchers Joel Lehman and Risto Miikkulainen, robots would quickly evolve in the event of any mass extinction (defined as the loss of at least 75 percent of the species on the planet), something that's already happened five times before in the past. In a survival of the fittest contest in which humans and robots start at zero (which is what we're really talking about with a mass extinction event), robots would win every time. That's because humans evolve linearly, while superintelligent robots would evolve exponentially.

"The program can achieve at least a draw against any opponent, playing either the black or white pieces," the researchers say in this week's online edition of the journal Science. "Clearly ... the world is not going to be revolutionized" by this, said Jonathan Schaeffer, chairman of the department of computing science at the University of Alberta. The important thing is the approach, he said. In the past, game-playing programs have used rules of thumb -- which are right most of the time, he said -- to make decisions. "What we've done is show that you can take non-trivial problems, very large problems, and you can do the same kind of reasoning with perfection. There is no error in the Chinook result. Schaeffer's team started with the end of a game with just one checker on the board. Then the team looked at every possible position with two checkers, on up to 10 checkers on the board. Every combination of 10 checkers offers 39 trillion positions for the endgame, he said. Chinook can calculate them all. It does not matter how the players make it to 10 checkers left because from that point on, the computer cannot lose, Schaeffer said. For two players who never make a mistake, every game would be a draw, he said. "'Checkers is solved' is an intriguing title for this wonderful and delightful article about another former human skill falling to the ubiquitous computer," said Ernest L. Hall, director of the Center for Robotics at the University of Cincinnati. That does not mean an end to people playing checkers, said Hall, who was not part of Schaeffer's research team. Even though a computer beat the world chess champion, people still enjoy and play the that game. "Anything we can do to encourage the further study of science and engineering, of developing problem solvers for the many known needs of the world, should be encouraged," Hall said. "So I applaud Schaeffer for making a breakthrough in computer problem solving for the game of checkers.

BARCELONA -- Ford's Motor's CEO stressed privacy and security when asked to weigh in on whether Apple should hack into a killer's iPhone, aligning with concerns big tech companies have raised on the issue. CEO Mark Fields' stance is fitting since one of the key issues driving his appearance at Mobile World Congress this week is Ford's continuing goal of being viewed as both automotive company and a tech-driven mobility company. "We're watching the (Apple) situation closely," Fields said during an interview with USA TODAY. "Our view as a company is we take the security and privacy of our customer data when they share it with us very carefully. We want to be trusting stewards for that data and we're committed to protecting it."

Mike Rhodin is senior vice president of IBM Watson. DETROIT -- IBM Watson initially won fame as the artificially intelligent computer system that won $1 million for whipping former Jeopardy! Since then, under the leadership of 1984 University of Michigan graduate Mike Rhodin, Watson has morphed into a muscular big business with lots of tentacles and more than 2,000 employees. Earlier this month in Ann Arbor, I interviewed Rhodin, the New York-based senior vice president of IBM Watson who was in town to speak with two groups of University of Michigan business students and budding entrepreneurs. Rhodin smiled when I asked the sci-fi question he hears often: When will machines turn on humans and take over the world?