Over July 4th weekend in 1981, several hundred game nerds gathered at a banquet hall in San Mateo, California. Personal computing was still in its infancy, and the tournament was decidedly low-tech. Each match played out on a rectangular table filled with paper game pieces, and a March Madness-style tournament bracket hung on the wall. The game was called Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron, a role-playing pastime of baroque complexity. Contestants did battle using vast fleets of imaginary warships, each player guided by an equally imaginary trillion-dollar budget and a set of rules that spanned several printed volumes. If they won, they advanced to the next round of war games--until only one fleet remained. Doug Lenat, then a 29-year-old computer science professor at nearby Stanford University, was among the players. But he didn't compete alone. He entered the tournament alongside Eurisko, the artificially intelligent system he built as part of his academic research. Eurisko ran on dozens of machines inside Xerox PARC--the computer research lab just down the road from Stanford that gave rise to the graphical user interface, the laser printer, and so many other technologies that would come to define the future of computing. That year, Lenat taught Eurisko to play Traveller. Doug Lenat says his common-sense engine is a new dawn for AI. The rest of the tech world doesn't really agree with him.

"The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans." A pretty profound line--considering this sentence is part of a book that was actually co-authored by an artificial intelligence (AI). While it may not have won the top prize, this short-form novel, which was a collaboration between humans and an AI program, managed to make it through the first round of screening for a national literary prize in Japan called the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. Titled'The Day A Computer Writes A Novel,' the short story was a team effort between human authors, led by Hitoshi Matsubara from the Future University Hakodate, and, well, a computer. Matsubara, who selected words and sentences for the book, set the parameters for the AI to construct the novel before letting the program take over and essentially "write" the novel by itself.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Marvin Minsky, an American scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) who co-founded vthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI laboratory, wrote several books on AI and philosophy, and was honored with the ACM A.M. Turing Award, passed away on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016 at the age of 88. Born in New York City, Minsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, the Bronx High School of Science, and Phillips Academy, before entering the U.S. Navy in 1944. After leaving the service, he attended Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1950. He then went to Princeton University, where he built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, the Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator (SNARC), before earning his Ph.D in mathematics there in 1954. Doctorate in hand, Minsky was admitted to the group of Junior Fellows at Harvard, where he invented the confocal scanning microscope for thick, light-scattering specimens, decades in advance of the lasers and computer power needed to make it useful; today, it is in wide use in the biological sciences.

Zittrain, J. Engineering an election – digital gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy.

U.S. President Barack Obama discussing his Computer Science for All plan to give students across the country the chance to learn computer science in school. In late January, U.S. President Barack Obama asked Congress to approve 4.1 billion in spending in the coming fiscal year to support the Computer Science for All initiative, aimed at providing computer science education in U.S. public schools. Obama pointed out computer science is no longer "an optional skill" in the modern economy," yet "only about a quarter of our K–12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) schools offer computer science. Twenty-two states don't even allow it to count toward a diploma." While many organizations have contributed to the national effort to see real computer science exist and count toward graduation requirements in U.S. public schools, former ACM CEO John R. White said, "ACM has been there from the beginning." Indeed, White contends Obama's Computer Science for All initiative "in a way represents the ...

It is widely regarded as one of the greatest human achievements ever made, but putting a man on the moon was no cheap undertaking. The Apollo missions to send just 12 men onto the dusty lunar surface cost 25 billion ( 17 billion) – estimated to be worth around 170 billion ( 120 billion) in modern monetary value. But it appears we may be able to send humans back to our rocky satellite and set up a permanent base where they could live for just a fraction of the cost. The cost of building a base on the moon could be a fraction of what has been previously expected. Scientists say it may be possible to build a permanent base (illustrated) housing 10 people within the next five to seven years for around 10 billion.

The Yomiuri ShimbunA short-form novel "coauthored" by humans and an artificial intelligence (AI) program passed the first screening process for a domestic literary prize, it was announced on Monday. However, the book did not win the final prize. Two teams submitted novels that were produced using AI. They held a press conference in Tokyo and made the announcement, which follows the recent victory of an AI program over a top Go player from South Korea. These achievements strongly suggest a dramatic improvement in AI capabilities. The following sentences come from the end of one of the the novels, "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" (The day a computer writes a novel): "I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement.

Just last week, an evil, god-like robot defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol, a tragic accomplishment that seemed decades away in 2012. In some ways it completed the Triple Crown of robot-fun-killing which began with Garry Kasparov's defeat at the hands of DeepBlue in 1997 and continued with the ritual slaughter of Ken Jennings on Jeopardy in 2011. And now, the robots are coming for our books. As reported by Japan News, researchers from Japan's Future University Hakodate have announced that a book co-written by team members and artificial intelligence made it onto the long list of the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The prize itself is somewhat unique.