I spent a reasonable portion of last year digging into neural networks and machine learning, wondering if and when computers were going to take my job. So when news broke of the "computer-generated musical" Beyond the Fence hitting London's West End, I was intrigued. After waiting for a couple of months, I headed to a performance of the show's limited run, but I left the theater unmoved. Computers can help write a musical, it seems, but they can't yet write a good one. "What if there was a wounded soldier who had to learn how to understand a child in order to find true love?" But before you can understand why it doesn't work and how the musical falls short, you need to understand how and why it was made.

It's easy to find computer vision technology that detect objects in photos, but it's still tough to sift through photos... and that's a big challenge for the military, where finding the right picture could mean taking out a target or spotting a terrorist threat. Thankfully, the US' armed forces may soon have a way to not only spot items in large image libraries, but help human observers find them. DARPA's upcoming, artificial intelligence-backed Visual Media Reasoning system both detects what's in a shot and presents it in a simple interface that bunches photos and videos together based on patterns. If you want to know where a distinctive-looking car has been, for example, you might only need to look in a single group. As you might suspect, the goal is to turn enemy media campaigns on their head -- all those online propaganda pics and training videos would make it much easier to pinpoint the whereabouts of bases and leaders.

Humanoids are supposed to be best suited for a world that's engineered for humans. They can climb stairs, open doors and drive cars. At DARPA Robotics Challenge, most of the participating humanoids succeeded in completing those tasks, but when it came to walking, they were clumsier than the species they were designed to emulate. Getting a machine to put one foot in front of the other has been a priority for roboticists for decades. Bipedal locomotion would presumably make it easier for robots to navigate a man-made world and perhaps make them more relatable.

ALEX CASTRO has been patient. Ever since his teenage years, when he volunteered to work on speech-recognition projects during an internship at AT&T Bell Labs, Mr Castro has been waiting for the technology to work well enough to become widely adopted. "I always felt that voice recognition was a technology that would someday be applied to mainstream uses," he says. While waiting for "someday" to arrive, the 32-year-old had time to finish his college degree, earn a Masters at Cornell, do a stint at Microsoft's MSN Entertainment business and oversee the launch of Amazon's Mechanical Turk online marketplace. Now Mr Castro has finally started his own firm, called Pluggd, a podcast directory with a nifty audio search-engine that can search audio clips (and the soundtracks of video clips) for keywords, using speech-recognition technology.

THE teams competing in DARPA's Grand Challenge (see article) have it easy. The driverless vehicles racing off-road in the Mojave desert merely have to avoid boulders, dunes and the occasional cactus. That is nothing compared with the hazards of the open road. Put those same autonomous vehicles on Interstate 15--the busy road that links Los Angeles and Las Vegas--and they would also have to contend with bleary-eyed weekenders, huge trucks and octogenarians puttering along in mobile homes. Even so, engineers and scientists at a handful of academic and industrial research centres are valiantly grappling with the problem of designing autonomous passenger vehicles, buses and trucks.

THEY certainly cannot be faulted for a lack of ambition. The scientists and engineers who gathered this week in Oxford for the first International Workshop on Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks are seeking to explain much of the world's behaviour through the use of "agents". In this context, an agent is a program that acts in a self-interested manner in its dealings with numerous other agents inside a computer. This arrangement can mimic almost any interactive system: a stockmarket; a habitat; even a business supply-chain. If the constituent parts can be understood, the reasoning goes, some insight into the whole will follow.

GIVEN the choice, who would you rather trust to safeguard your future: a bloodsucking lawyer or a cold, calculating computer? Granted, it's not much of a choice, since neither lawyers nor computers are renowned for their compassion. But it is a choice that you may well encounter in the not-too-distant future, as software based on "artificial intelligence" (AI) starts to dispense legal advice. Instead of paying a lawyer by the hour, you will have the option of consulting intelligent legal services via the web. While this might sound outlandish, experts believe that the advent of smart software capable of giving good, solid legal advice could revolutionise the legal profession.

JUST below a half-opened garage door a tiny device can be seen at the feet of someone lurking in the shadows. It looks like a blue dragonfly. Then its miniature wings begin to flap as it slips under the door and darts along the street. After rising through the air it stops to hover outside the window of a building several storeys high. There is an opening on the roof, and it slips inside.

JUST as native English-speakers stumble with Japanese, the Japanese struggle mightily with English, not to mention Korean or Chinese. In the widely used TOEFL tests of English as a foreign language, Japan invariably ranks second from bottom among the 29 countries participating in the scheme. Compared with the 150m people around the world who speak English as a second language, there are only 9m non-native speakers of Japanese--and most of those were forced to learn the language during Japan's era of colonial occupation, and are now dying of old age. For those who put their faith in technology, therefore, it was encouraging to hear Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, demonstrate his linguistic skills a few weeks ago with a palm-sized gizmo that provided instantaneous translations of spoken Japanese into near-flawless English and Chinese. Mr Abe can manage perfectly well without such a device, being one of the few Japanese prime ministers in recent years to speak English fluently.

IS IT a new medium on a par with film and music, a valuable educational tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into violent zombies? Video gaming is all these things, depending on whom you ask. Gaming has gone from a minority activity a few years ago to mass entertainment. Video games increasingly resemble films, with photorealistic images, complex plotlines and even famous actors. The next generation of games consoles--which will be launched over the next few months by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo--will intensify the debate over gaming and its impact on society, as the industry tries to reach out to new customers and its opponents become ever more vocal. Games consoles are the most powerful mass-produced computers in the world and the new machines will offer unprecedented levels of performance.