Games

Set in a fictional San Francisco, Change Is Good: A Story of the Heroic Era of the Internet, follows the intertwined adventures of a startup CEO, a WIRED reporter, a code-writing true believer, and many more instantly iconic characters ripped from the mists of the first dotcom boom. The grainy black-and-white image on the big screen behind the band is a progression of blindfolded heads kissing, some tentatively, some lustily. On the edge of the dance floor, Carl finds himself in one of two lines approaching a big plywood box from opposite directions. Both kissers withdraw, remove their blindfolds, and are surprised to discover that they saw each other that afternoon--the lips Carl kissed were those of Danny Katz, the WIRED reporter he'd run into earlier in the Gnuhere reception area.

For example, when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program defeated South Korean Master Lee Se-dol in the board game Go earlier this year, the terms AI, machine learning, and deep learning were used in the media to describe how DeepMind won. Another algorithmic approach from the early machine-learning crowd, Artificial Neural Networks, came and mostly went over the decades. Today, image recognition by machines trained via deep learning in some scenarios is better than humans, and that ranges from cats to identifying indicators for cancer in blood and tumors in MRI scans. Deep Learning has enabled many practical applications of Machine Learning and by extension the overall field of AI.

For example, a major scientific achievement in computing this past year featured reinforcement-learning programs by a computer that outperformed humans in AlphaGo, a massively complex game that build on learning algorithms, modeled after the ancient board game, Go. These DeepMind neural networks function differently than other AI platforms such as IBM's Deep Blue program or Watson, which were assembled from large databases and developed for a pre-defined purpose, and which only function within its scope. Whereas computer programs had previously used Monte Carlo tree search algorithm strategies (search engine programs designed to instruct plays in computer games) to find its moves in the game – like a computer using a database of options programmed by a human in order to select the next proper chess move. However, in these recent advances, the Google Deep Mind programs that operate AlphaGo are able to select moves based on knowledge the programs learned themselves from machine learning in an artificial neural network based on human and computer play.

In this April 30, 2015, file photo, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk unveils the company's newest products, in Hawthorne, Calif. In this April 30, 2015, file photo, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk unveils the company's newest products, in Hawthorne, Calif. One of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's companies, the nonprofit start-up OpenAI, manufactures a device that last week was victorious in defeating some of the world's top gamers in an international video game (e-sport) tournament with a multi-million-dollar pot of prize money. It was not long before philosopher Hilary Putnam would hypothesize the mind is a Turing Machine (and a Turning Machine just is, for all intents and purposes, what we call a computer today). And if we are, then what are we going to do if some clever young person some where -- maybe a young lady in North Korea -- writes a program to turn things off?

Groundbreaking AI models have bested humans in complex reasoning games, like the recent victory of Google's AlphaGo AI over the human Go champ. Thoughtfully combining human expertise and automated functionality creates an "augmented" physician model that scales and advances the expertise of the doctor. Physicians would rather practice at the top of their licensing and address complex patient interaction than waste time entering data, faxing (yes, faxing!) But to radically advance health care productivity, physicians must work alongside innovators to atomize the tasks of their work.

On Monday evening, Pajkatt won using an unusual item build (buying an early magic wand). Further training before Sumail's match on Thursday increased TrueSkill by two points. We set up the bot at a LAN event at The International, where players played over 1,000 games to beat the bot by any means possible. The game gave an obscure error message on GPU cloud instances.

And sure enough, there are more than 10,000 Peppers now at work in SoftBank stores, Pizza Huts, cruise ships, homes, and elsewhere. In a less anxious world, Pepper might come across as a cute technological novelty. Over the past few years, it has become conventional wisdom that dramatic advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have put us on the path to a jobless future. This anxiety about automation is understandable in light of the hair-raising progress that tech companies have made lately in robotics and artificial intelligence, which is now capable of, among other things, defeating Go masters, outbluffing champs in Texas Hold'em, and safely driving a car.

Anca Dragan UC Berkeley Ensuring that robots and humans work and play well together. Angela Schoellig University of Toronto Her algorithms are helping self-driving and self-flying vehicles get around more safely. Jianxiong Xiao AutoX His company AutoX aims to make self-driving cars more accessible. Volodymyr Mnih DeepMind The first system to play Atari games as well as a human can.

It was up against a crowd favorite, the pro player "Dendi" who is one of the best in the world when it comes to Dota 2. He was surprised that it was possible for the AI machine to beat a human player - and therefore human intelligence. We've seen AI beat humans in games like Chess or Go before - but nothing as advanced as Dota 2. So how do you teach a computer to play such a complex game like Dota 2?

They're also around in education, where bots increase student engagement or act as teaching assistants. Georgia tech replaced a teaching assistant with a bit that none of the students noticed was a bot – they even put it up for a teaching award. Whether you are answering customer queries about your product or being a teacher answering questions from your students, the same queries and questions keep popping up. As with many areas of AI, we started with ELIZA but have come to the age of algorithms, where companies use bots to deliver services, universities use bots to teach, governments feel the need to ban bots and bots start to rival humans in what they can do in certain domains.