The Season 2 finale of HBO's existential tech-western "Westworld" airs this weekend, but Season 3 probably won't drop until 2020, so fans may be forgiven if they're already beginning to experience withdrawal symptoms. But diehard devotees who can't get enough of the carefully crafted worldbuilding and the layered mysteries now have another way to immerse themselves in the show. HBO and 360i released a new "Westworld" skill for Amazon's voice-activated Alexa assistant today. A 30-second trailer by 360i introduces the concept. Anyone with an Echo or other Alexa-enabled device can play an interactive game set in the universe of the series by asking her to "Open Westworld."

Epic has done something sneaky where they're able to hide a few of their Fortnite challenges from the eyes of dataminers until hours before release. That happened this week where a "TBD" challenge was revealed to be the return of gnomes as a world object to find. And here's where you'll find seven hungry gnomes to complete the season 4, week 8 challenge. We last saw gnomes in Fortnite season 3 as a challenge, and there were seven you had to find back then as well. That time, however, those were "hidden gnomes" and these are now "hungry gnomes," as presumably they've grown quite peckish with no one locating them for a full season now.

Almost everyone today uses some form of machine learning unintentionally. Several algorithms support the search features of Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn. The same goes for selecting assets on Netflix, Spotify or YouTube. Even when you use your phone for Siri, Okay Google or Amazon Alexa, the voice recognition and search commands are supported by machine learning. Facebook stopped an "Artificial Intelligence Engine" after the developers discovered that the AI had created its own unique language that they could not understand.

All of us have heard about driverless cars, automated machines, bots and virtual assistants, even if we don't fully understand what these terms mean. All of these are manifestations of self-learning algorithms, smart technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The application of these technologies is no longer just limited to sci-fi movies and erudite research papers. Directed by data-driven insights from these powerful technologies, traditional decision-making by experienced professionals is slowly being transformed. Let's take a look, then, at this metamorphosis that AI is ushering in across business functions such as marketing.

The primary functionality difference between the two is that the Megablast has integrated Amazon Alexa voice control. To enable this, the Megablast adds Wi-Fi to its connectivity options. That means you can use Alexa to stream tracks from Amazon Music Unlimited or Spotify, although iPhone users should note that it's not AirPlay compatible, so Apple Music streaming is Bluetooth only. As part of that smart speaker angle, Ultimate Ears sells an optional Power Up base ($39.99)

There's more than one way to build a paywall. Over the last year, Swiss news publisher Neue Zürcher Zeitung has been using a payment system that is personalized to the individual based on hundreds of criteria. NZZ requires people to register and eventually, pay. But when readers get these registration and payment messages and how those messages look varies based on predefined rules, dozens of A/B tests and machine learning. "If we're to be successful in paid content, we need to individualize the experience with our product and the product itself, and automate our marketing approach," said Steven Neubauer, managing director at Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Graph Weighted Models (GWMs) have recently been proposed as a natural generalization of weighted automata over strings and trees to arbitrary families of labeled graphs (and hypergraphs). A GWM generically associates a labeled graph with a tensor network and computes a value by successive contractions directed by its edges. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning GWMs defined over the graph family of pictures (or 2-dimensional words). As a proof of concept, we consider regression and classification tasks over the simple Bars & Stripes and Shifting Bits picture languages and provide an experimental study investigating whether these languages can be learned in the form of a GWM from positive and negative examples using gradient-based methods. Our results suggest that this is indeed possible and that investigating the use of gradient-based methods to learn picture series and functions computed by GWMs over other families of graphs could be a fruitful direction.

CEOs of artificial intelligence companies usually seek to minimize the threats posed by AI, rather than play them up. But on this week's episode of Converge, Clara Labs co-founder and CEO Maran Nelson tells us there is real reason to be worried about AI -- and not for the reasons that science fiction has trained us to expect. Movies like Her and Ex Machina depict a near future in which anthropomorphic artificial intelligences manipulate our emotions and even commit violence against us. But threats like Ex Machina's Ava will require several technological breakthroughs before they're even remotely plausible, Nelson says. And in the meantime, actual state-of-the-art AI -- which uses machine learning to make algorithmic predictions -- is already causing harm.

This Amazon Echo doesn't seem to understand that all I want is a whiskey. I'm seated in the Tribeca offices of marketing firm 360i and the haunting voice coming out of its little speaker just says, "Never heard of it." The problem is that me and 360i's creative director Andrew Hunter both gave the order at the same time and "Rose," our guide at the Mariposa Saloon in this audio play, couldn't make it out. Instead, we opt to take a walk through Sweetwater, the fictional town where Westworld takes place, and eventually wind up at a narrative dead end when we don't know the location of someone that one of the townspeople is looking for. It's over, and soon we'll be, theoretically, sent back to the the Mesa Hub to have our memories wiped and be shoved back out into the Mariposa to run through our loops again. This is what it's like to go to Westworld thanks to a (fairly) smart cylindrical speaker.

There was a lot of speculation about where the comet would hit during Season 3 of Fortnite: Battle Royale. Most people thought the thing was heading for Tilted Towers as part of a broad-scale map rebalancing to reduce the city's importance in the current meta. The theory was that it would level tilted and later trigger some sort of dinosaur or post-apocalyptic-themed Season 4. Clearly, that didn't happen, but one Reddit user was telling us that all along. InternetAdam turned out to have some genuine intel on Season 4, accurately predicting both the Dusty Depot impact and the superhero theme. InternetAdam's other prediction about Season 4 was that the map was going to start changing weekly in small ways rather than all at once, and that certainly came true.