A chatbot pretending to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy made waves last weekend when its programmers announced that it had passed the Turing test. But the judges of this test were apparently easily fooled, because any cursory exchange with'Eugene Goosterman' reveals the machine inside the ghost. Maybe the time has come, 60 years after Alan Turing's death, to discard the idea that imitating human conversation is a good test of artificial intelligence. "I start my Cognitive Science class with a slide titled'Artificial Stupidity,'" said Noah Goodman, director of the computation and cognition lab at Stanford University. "People have made progress on the Turing test by making chatbots quirkier and stupider."

At Google, artificial intelligence isn't just a means of building cars that drive on their own, smartphone services that respond to the spoken word, and online search engines that instantly recognize digital images. It's also a way of improving the efficiency of the massive data centers that underpin the company's entire online empire. According to Joe Kava, the man who oversees the design and operation of Google's worldwide network of data centers, the web giant is now using artificial neural networks to analyze how these enormous computing centers behave, and then hone their operation accordingly. These neural networks are essentially computer algorithms that can recognize patterns and then make decisions based on those patterns. They can't exactly duplicate the intelligence of the human brain, but in some cases, they can work much faster–and more comprehensively–than the brain. And that's why Google is applying these algorithms to its data center operations.

Andrew Ng is the man who helped launch Google's wildly ambitious effort to recreate the human brain with computer hardware and software. And now, he will oversee a similar project at Baidu, often called "the Google of China." Last year, in Cupertino, California, not far from Apple headquarters, Baidu quietly opened a research outpost dedicated to "deep learning"–a subfield of artificial intelligence that seeks to vastly improve computing tasks by mimicking the way the human brain operates–and in the months since, this operation has expanded in significant ways. Today, the Chinese search giant will announce that the lab has graduated to a much larger space in Sunnyvale and that Ng, a Stanford University professor, will oversee a new Baidu artificial intelligence research group that spans this lab and an operation in China. "Andrew is one of the intellectual leaders in machine learning, and deep learning in particular," says Bruno Olshausen, the director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.

Never mind that the robot and the heart are made of Legos. Her team at KIPP DC: AIM Academy, a charter school, is part of a burgeoning program that uses the children's toys to make engineering more exciting and accessible to students in elementary, middle and high school - an effort that has experienced success in its first years. At Washington area Lego robotics competitions, Brittany's team is one of a small but growing number of predominantly African American groups. Although most of the Virginia/DC First Lego League's 3,500 entrants and 437 teams are from the suburbs, the Symbiotic Titans are one of a few teams from east of the Anacostia River. Maryland also has a First Lego League.

The silver, three-wheeled RAVEN moon rover is the size of a golf cart, weighs 800 pounds, and is powered by two super-size car batteries. Its "brain" is the same kind of computer processor found in a netbook. Students in the Department of Aerospace Engineering's Space Systems Laboratory built the rover, which won a NASA design competition. As a smart, mobile assistant for astronauts, the rover and its robotic arm theoretically could follow instructions to bore holes into the moon's surface, collect rock samples and even carry an astronaut to safety in an emergency. Space systems lab students also designed a companion spacesuit to allow an astronaut to give the rover voice and keypad commands remotely.

STUDENTS at a Welsh university are to begin preparing for a world shared with intelligent robots. A new degree in robotics will teach students how to apply science fiction in science. The release of the big-screen adaptation of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot has fuelled speculation about whether robots designed as servants could attempt to become our masters. Dr Mike Reddy at the University of Glamorgan is determined to take these questions from the realm of science fiction and explore them in the new BSc Science (Robotics) degree. He said, "Films like I, Robot and Artificial Intelligence have raised issues of how we treat robots, but, more importantly, how they might treat us. There is a great deal of interest and ignorance of what robotics is and will become in the future. "We feel there is a real need for greater understanding of what a world shared with robots should be.

Virtually the entire FutureHAUS kitchen prototype is handle free. At this point, everyone from tiny startups to multinational corporations have taken a crack at dreaming up the home of the future. Between Electrolux's flying mini-robots and GE's automated laundry machines, the practice is an easy (and marketable) way to blow the internet's collective mind. Well, now we can add public universities to the list of domestic futurists. A group of students and professors from Virginia Tech's Center for Design Research has revealed a concept kitchen called the FutureHAUS--and it's already making futurists blush.

Television critics will tell you that The Bionic Woman was just another cheesy '70s sci-fi series, but for Ayanna Howard it was a springboard to a career. When she was 12 years old, she became so captivated by the show's cyborg premise that she started reading books that reaffirmed the concept of integrating machines with humans. A thousand reruns and an electrical-engineering Ph.D. later, she's creating robots that think like humans for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The Bionic Woman showed real, brilliant people giving life through bionics," says Howard, now 32. "I figured I could do it too."

Today, mathematics and computer science often appear as the province of geniuses working at the very edge of human ability and imagination. Even as American high schools struggle to employ qualified math and science teachers, American popular culture has embraced math, science, and computers as a mystic realm of extraordinary intellectual power, even verging on madness. Movies like A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, and Pi all present human intelligence in the esoteric symbolism of long, indecipherable, but visually captivating equations. One has to think of such prosaic activities as paying the mortgage and grocery shopping to be reminded of the quiet and non-revelatory quality of rudimentary arithmetic. Which is not to put such labor down.

A "smart" Barbie doll that can have "conversations" with children should not go on sale, privacy advocates have said. Billed as the world's first "interactive doll", the toy uses voice recognition technology similar to that employed by Apple's Siri and Google's Now digital assistants to understand what a child is saying to Barbie and respond. However, privacy advocates are worried about the use of voice recognition technology that sends recordings of children to third-party companies for processing, potentially revealing his or her intimate thoughts and details. "If I had a young child, I would be very concerned that my child's intimate conversations with her doll were being recorded and analysed," said Professor Angela Campbell of Georgetown University law school. "In Mattel's demo, Barbie asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child, her interests, and her family. This information could be of great value to advertisers and be used to market unfairly to children."