And then, at the very top layer you have detectors that can tell you whether you're looking at a person or a dog or a sailplane or whatever it is."

The genetic risk for autism exists in every person, scientists today revealed. As a result, the principal signs of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) are seen in each individual - just to varying degrees. Those with the most severe symptoms are the proportion of the population officially diagnosed with ASD, the scientists from the University of Bristol, Harvard and MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital found. They set out to identifying if there is a genetic relationship between ASD and ASD-related traits in people not considered to have ASD. Their findings reveal the risk underlying ASD affects a range of behavioural and developmental traits in all people.

Minecraft is to become a testing ground for artificial intelligence experiments. Microsoft, owner of the popular video game, revealed that computer scientists and amateurs will be able to evaluate and develop AI software using its virtual landscapes from July. The company says Minecraft is more "sophisticated" than existing AI research simulations and cheaper to use than building a robot. "This is the state-of-the-art," said Prof Jose Hernandez-Orallo from the Technical University of Valencia, one of a small group of academics given early access to the software. "At this moment there is nothing comparable, and this is just in its beginnings, so I see many possibilities for it."

Fighting cyber attacks with artificial intelligence The next frontier of anti-virus software is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to not only predict what threats are out there, but to also actively fight back before they strike. This is according to American-based Cylance's chief marketing officer, Greg Fitzgerald, speaking at the NetEvents Press and Analyst Summit in Rome, Italy.The company says it is "revolutionising cyber security through the use of AI and machine learning to proactively prevent advanced persistent threats and malware". Cylance today announced it is expanding into the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) with the establishment of a London-based team led by Evan Davidson, former enterprise sales director at FireEye. It also established a channel partnership with CoreSec Systems, which supplies cyber security and networking solutions in Sweden and Denmark.

The term Artificial Intelligence was originally coined by John McCarthy in 1955, defining it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines". Now more than a half a century old, the field of AI and machine learning is finally achieving some of its oldest goals by being used successfully in areas such as data mining, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software, medical diagnosis and search engines. Tech giants have all been investing heavily in AI and Machine Learning. In 2010 Facebook introduced facial recognition technology, and in 2013 Mark Zuckerberg dedicated a lab to AI research. In 2014 Google bought artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for 400 million ( 263 million), making it one of the largest tech acquisitions to date.

Google has a special way to improve the quality of search results: artificial intelligence (AI.) The company uses a type of AI known as machine learning to figure out what its users really want to search for. Machine learning is where a computer gradually teaches itself how to perform a task. One example of that is Google DeepMind, which learned how to play retro arcade games over time. Google's machine learning system for search is called RankBrain, and it tries to figure out what a user is searching for.

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. The number of new malware variations that pop up each day runs somewhere between 390,000 (according to AV-TEST Institute) and one million (according to Symantec Corporation). These are new strains of malware that have not been seen in the wild before. Even if we consider just the low end figure, the situation is still dire. Especially when it comes to advanced persistent threats (APTs), which are the most sophisticated mutations of viruses and malware, which are very effective at going completely undetected by many of the cybersecurity technologies in use today.

The search base at Go is too enormous and too vast for a brute force approach to have any chance of succeeding… The search process itself is not based on brute force, more on something akin to imagination…. Humans are not able to make the precise tree-based computation that computers are able to perform. Humans have a limitation in the number of Go games they are able to process in a lifetime… It is at least conceivable that AlphaGo could, given enough processing, given enough training, given enough search power, reach a level that's beyond any human. The machine knew the move wouldn't make sense to all those humans. And yet it played the move anyway, because this machine has seen so many moves that no human ever has…. It came to realize that, although no professional would play it, the move would likely prove quite successful.

What it's about: If you've been looking for the latest indicator that machine learning and AI are about to burst out of the lab and into the mainstream, look no further: Rolling Stone, not exactly a must-read in the tech industry, is serving up a big two-part feature on "the artificial intelligence revolution." Part one went online this week, and it's well worth the read. Author Jeff Goodell dispenses with some of the entertainment and media tropes around AI--bow down before your robot overlords, and so on--in favor of what AI, like so much of modern software, is really all about: Algorithms. "Algorithms are to the 21st Century what coal was to the 19th Century: the engine of our economy and the fuel of our modern lives," Goodell writes. "In the world of AI, the Holy Grail is to discover the single algorithm that will allow machines to understand the world--the digital equivalent of the Standard Model that lets physicists explain the operations of the universe." Of course, no one's found that yet, and true AI isn't actually here yet: "AIs are nowhere near as smart as a rat," Facebook director of AI research Yann LeCun tells Goodell.

When the average person on the street hears the words Artificial Intelligence, they usually think sentient robots coming to take their job, and potentially their life. Which is understandable, partly because films like Terminator have conditioned us to think like that, and partly because it could well be true. Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk say it might happen, and they're very rarely wrong about anything. When people hear Machine Learning on the other hand, the tendency is not so much to grab a weapon and hide under the bed until the robot apocalypse comes. It's to express a healthy reverence for how such algorithms will benefit technology and make our lives easier.