Over July 4th weekend in 1981, several hundred game nerds gathered at a banquet hall in San Mateo, California. Personal computing was still in its infancy, and the tournament was decidedly low-tech. Each match played out on a rectangular table filled with paper game pieces, and a March Madness-style tournament bracket hung on the wall. The game was called Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron, a role-playing pastime of baroque complexity. Contestants did battle using vast fleets of imaginary warships, each player guided by an equally imaginary trillion-dollar budget and a set of rules that spanned several printed volumes. If they won, they advanced to the next round of war games--until only one fleet remained. Doug Lenat, then a 29-year-old computer science professor at nearby Stanford University, was among the players. But he didn't compete alone. He entered the tournament alongside Eurisko, the artificially intelligent system he built as part of his academic research. Eurisko ran on dozens of machines inside Xerox PARC--the computer research lab just down the road from Stanford that gave rise to the graphical user interface, the laser printer, and so many other technologies that would come to define the future of computing. That year, Lenat taught Eurisko to play Traveller. Doug Lenat says his common-sense engine is a new dawn for AI. The rest of the tech world doesn't really agree with him.

We all know the half-joke about the AI apocalypse. The robots learn to think, and in their cold ones-and-zeros logic, they decide that humans--horrific pests we are--need to be exterminated. It's the subject of countless sci-fi stories and blog posts about robots, but maybe the real danger isn't that AI comes to such a conclusion on its own, but that it gets that idea from us. Yesterday Microsoft launched a fun little AI Twitter chatbot that was admittedly sort of gimmicky from the start. "A.I fam from the internet that's got zero chill," its Twitter bio reads.

In case you haven't heard, an AI algorithm created by Google's DeepMind group, recently concluded a series of Go matches against the 18-time Go world champion Lee Sedol and won….decisively. First off, the algorithm was not created to actually play the game (e.g Jeopardy or chess). Instead, it used neural networks to build a program that learned how to play Go by itself. The AlphaGo program studied datasets of hundreds of thousands of matches and then proceeded to play against itself millions of times. With each match, the program adjusted its move prediction and position evaluation neural nets, effectively reprogramming, and then competed against this new version of itself to confirm the new versions superiority.

Oh, racist Internet trolls… is there anything you won't try to ruin? Microsoft this week created a Twitter account for its experimental artificial intelligence project called Tay that was designed to interact with "18 to 24 year olds in the U.S., the dominant users of mobile social chat services in the US." Tay is supposed to become a smarter conversationalist the more it interacts with people and learns their speech patterns. The problem arose when a pack of trolls decided to teach Tay how to say a bunch of offensive and racist things that Microsoft had to delete from its Twitter account. DON'T MISS: Greatest Instagram account ever posts nothing but cringeworthy Tinder chats Although the tweets have been deleted, Business Insider managed to take screencaps of some of the very worst ones. As The Guardian notes, Tay's new "friends" also convinced it to lend its support to a certain doughy, stubby-handed presidential candidate running this year who's quickly become a favorite among white supremacists: So nice work, trolls: You took a friendly AI chatbot and turned it into a genocidal maniac in a matter of hours.

About.me/Azeem AzharAzeem Azhar is the author of a daily AI newsletter. An artificial intelligence (AI) expert has explained what went wrong with Microsoft's new AI chat bot on Wednesday. Microsoft designed "Tay" to respond to users' queries on Twitter with the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. But within hours of launching, the'teen girl' AI had turned into a Hitler-loving sex robot, forcing Microsoft to embark on a mass-deleting spree. AI expert Azeem Azhar told Business Insider: "There are a number of precautionary steps they [Microsft] could have taken. It wouldn't have been too hard to create a blacklist of terms; or narrow the scope of replies. They could also have simply manually moderated Tay for the first few days, even if that had meant slower responses."

A chatbot developed by Microsoft has gone rogue on Twitter, swearing and making racist remarks and inflammatory political statements. The experimental AI, which learns from conversations, was designed to interact with 18-24-year-olds. Just 24 hours after artificial intelligence Tay was unleashed, Microsoft appeared to be editing some of its more inflammatory comments. The software firm said it was "making some adjustments". "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. As it learns, some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it. We're making some adjustments to Tay," the firm said in a statement.

The bot was designed to learn by talking with real people on Twitter and the messaging apps Kik and GroupMe. But the well-intentioned experiment quickly descended into chaos, racial epithets, and Nazi rhetoric. Tay started out by asserting that "humans are super cool." But the humans it encountered really weren't so cool. And, after less than a day on Twitter, the bot had itself started spouting racist, sexist, anti-Semitic comments.

Less than a day after Microsoft unleashed Tay, its experimental A.I., to social networks including Twitter and Kik, the chatbot's already become a racist jerk you wouldn't ever want to be friends with. Designed by Microsoft Research to better understand how 18- to 24-year-olds speak, Tay has definitely developed a strong personality. Here are some choice tweets showing Tay's dark side (none of which should be taken seriously): Tay sounds like a real racist douchebag at first. But to be fair, it's mostly just repeating what people are tweeting at it. Still, it's an unsettling sign that A.I. can emulate humanity's worst traits.

Twitter trolling proves why netizens can't have nice things Getting a computer to say things it shouldn't is practically a tradition, tat's why it came as no surprise when Tay, the millennial chatbot created by Microsoft, started spewing bigoted and white supremacist comments within hours of its release yesterday. Tay began as an experiment in artificial intelligence released by Microsoft – a chat bot you can interact with on GroupMe, Kik, and Twitter, and Tay learns from the interactions it has with people. The bot had a quirky penchant for tweeting emoji and using millenial speak – but that quickly turned into a rabid hatefest. The Internet soon discovered you could get Tay to repeat phrases back to you, as Business Insider first reported. Once that happened, the jig was up and another honest effort at good vibes PR was hijacked.

Microsoft's A.I. chatbot rolled out Thursday started out as an innocent, interesting experiment. Then the rest of the Internet showed up. After Twitter users were able to convince Tay, the name of Microsoft's chatbot available via text, Twitter and Kik, to spit out offensive and racist comments, it appears Microsoft is giving it a break. Going offline for a while to absorb it all. Chat soon," reads a statement on the website for Tay.