It's pretty much universally agreed that we shouldn't give AI-powered robots rocket launchers and set them loose to battle each other to the death. Luckily, we can recreate that in a video game. Facebook and Intel took home 1st place prizes today (Sept. The 1993 video game, in which a player fights the scourge of hell, has become a touchstone for AI research for its simple 3D maps and potential for different styles of play. Facebook, which competed under the team name F1, took home the (figurative) gold medal in the competition's first challenge, where AIs are armed with rocket launchers on a map they've seen before. The goal was simple: kill each other.

We may need to start rewriting our precious lawyer jokes -- smart, time-saving computers are quickly elevating the profession. Instead of hiring expensive assistants to pore over cases and sort through tickets, law firms are increasingly turning toward artificially-intelligent machines to do the expensive menial jobs instead. They are creating a future in which a costly and inefficient legal system actually becomes an attractive way for the average citizen to protect his or her civil liberties. Andrew Arruda, the CEO and co-founder of ROSS Intelligence, tells Tech Insider that "AI-enabled software is going to become very much the status quo and very normal" in the coming decade. Arruda's company recently deployed the ROSS software at a handful of law firms throughout the US.

Google's open-source code release uses its third-gen "Inception" model and a new vision system that's better at picking out individual objects in a shot. "For example, an image classification model will tell you that a dog, grass and a frisbee are in the image, but a natural description should also tell you the color of the grass and how the dog relates to the frisbee," the team wrote. After it was trained using human captions, Google's system was able to describe images it hasn't seen before. "Excitingly, our model does indeed develop the ability to generate accurate new captions when presented with completely new scenes, indicating a deeper understanding of the objects and context in the images," the researchers say. Using several photos of dogs on beach (above), for instance, it was able to generate a caption for a similar, but slightly different scene.

Let's be honest, stupid humans are too smart sometimes for their own good and Skynet is going to happen, at least that's what Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk think, but what do they know? In 2014, Stephen Hawking wrote: "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history, – Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets." In a separate interview in the same year, he warned: "humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded by A.I." In a Reddit Q&A Session in January 2015 Gates said: "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned."

Apple says their voice recognition app Siri is improved. USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham puts Siri through a few tests to find out. Siri's closest Indian restaurant turned out to be in San Jose, California, just a 6 hour drive from Los Angeles (Photo: Robert Hanashiro) LOS ANGELES -- Hey, Siri: if you can't find me an Indian restaurant just three miles from my office, what can you get right? With the IOS 10 mobile operating system upgrade, Apple has promised us that its five-year-old personal digital assistant Siri would be better than ever, and would expand beyond the core Apple apps to also work with third-party apps like LinkedIn, Uber and Pinterest. The results of my tests is that Siri is slightly improved, but only if you take the time to enunciate correctly and slowly, and teach the voice-activated assistant what you want.

This summer, the Google X lab launched a balloon into the stratosphere over Peru, and it stayed there for 98 days. Launching balloons into the stratosphere is a usual thing for the Google X lab--or just X, as it's now called after spinning off from Google and nestling under the new umbrella called Alphabet. X is home to Project Loon, an effort to beam the Internet from the stratosphere down to people here on Earth. The hope is that these balloons can fly over areas of the globe where the Internet is otherwise unavailable and stay there long enough to provide people with a reliable connection. But there's a problem: balloons tend to float away.

It's great to be an AI developer right now, but maybe not a good time to have a job that can be done by a machine. Take image captioning -- Google has released its "Show and Tell" algorithm to developers, who can train it recognize objects in photos with up to 93.9 percent accuracy. That's a significant improvement from just two years ago, when it could correctly classify 89.6 percent of images. Better photo descriptions can be used in numerous ways to help historians, visually impaired folks, and of course, other AI researchers, to name a few examples. Google's open-source code release uses its third-gen "Inception" model and a new vision system that's better at picking out individual objects in a shot.

It's usually a pretty big deal when Google releases a new Android app, and that's doubly true this week. Allo is the company's new chat app, which bundles in the brainy Google Assistant for good measure, while Google Travel makes it easy to plan for and make the most of your next trip without putting in a ton of work. Google's own apps lead our latest look at the Play Store's hottest new releases, but they're not alone this week. Also worth a look is the charming Paper Planes, which debuted at I/O this year, while Don't Starve: Pocket Edition brings a popular survival game to Android and Dog Sled Saga turns the grueling activity into a fun arcade game and management simulation. Stickers, games, artificial intelligence--and yes, chat too.

For trend-conscious corporate executives in Japan, a connected world is not a distant future in the making but a reality. A growing number of Japanese companies are waking up to the need to sharpen their business strategies and boost investment as the hunt for the next big thing intensifies. The prospect of an aging Japan and a shrinking domestic market is also giving them the opportunity of pondering how they can help solve social and business issues as the country gravitates toward connecting everything from home appliances to cars and factories to the internet. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for its part, is pinning hopes on the benefits of the so-called internet of things and artificial intelligence, hoping that they will become a growth driver rather than a stumbling block at a time when the world's third-largest economy continues to struggle. "I've wanted to do something that will make an industrial change, now that we have IoT, big data, and AI," said Yosuke Okada, the 27-year-old chief executive officer of startup ABEJA Inc. "Japan has many researchers in the field of AI … but there seems to be little interest in solving the kinds of challenges we face in society by monetizing AI-based businesses," Okada said in a recent interview.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display