When Google's AI beat a world champion at Go, scientists and technologists around the globe held it up as a watershed moment for AI. But why, exactly, is it so hard for a computer to play some games well? Without wanting to sound like a scene from the cutting room floor of Karate Kid, the truth is that out of seemingly simple rules can grow great complexity. Complexity that even the very best artificial intelligence systems struggles to come to grips with--at least if they're to play convincingly against a talented human. In this video, Rob Miles form the University of Nottingham in the UK explains how that complexity comes about and why computers can struggle to deal with it. Warning: This is 20 minutes long, but it is an interesting insight into the way computers handle something humans can take for granted.

Economic inequality has become a prominent issue in this year's U.S. presidential election. Candidates in both parties argue that the wealthy have bent the political system to their own economic benefit. And while the rich have grown richer, wages for the median worker have been stagnant. By many measures, the gap between high earners and low earners has widened substantially. But is this all the result of nefarious influence-peddling by the 1%?

The team used a powerful deep-learning model, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), to trawl 500,000 words in its database, looking at their sequence in a sentence to understand what they mean, then predicting how to categorize them. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech. The size reflects the frequency of word use – looks like guys called Andrew are Amy's biggest users – with blue representing nouns, purple for verbs, orange for proper nouns, green for adjectives, red for conjunctions and yellow for adverbs. If you look closely, you'll notice that the kinds of busy people who are beta users of Amy are also likely to talk about founders, coffee and Skype.

The folks over at x.ai – creators of Amy, the artificial intelligence answer to scheduling meetings – have had a shot at showing exactly what it looks like inside their bot's brain, using AI, of course. The team used a powerful deep-learning model, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), to trawl 500,000 words in its database, looking at their sequence in a sentence to understand what they mean, then predicting how to categorize them. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech. Without a human ever telling the RNN the definitions of different word groups, it has managed to understand that Stanford is different from Instagram, and that Jesse, Luke and Jason are names. This data was cut to down to the 3,500 most frequently used words and has then been projected into a 2D shape in order to show the relationships the AI has made between different words.

Microsoft's AI chatbot Tay was only a few hours old, and humans had already corrupted it into a machine that cheerfully spewed racist, sexist and otherwise hateful comments. Tay was developed by the technology and research and Bing teams at Microsoft Corp. to conduct research on "conversational understanding." The bot talks like a teenager (it says it has "zero chill") and is designed to chat with people ages 18 to 24 in the U.S. on social platforms such as Twitter, GroupMe and Kik, according to its website. "The more Humans share with me the more I learn," Tay tweeted several times Wednesday -- its only day of Twitter life. But Tay might have learned too much.

Let's face it: if you grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, you probably see virtual reality as just a stepping stone toward the Holy Grail of simulation, the Holodeck. It's no surprise, then, that Reddit users illogical_cpt and Bradllez have found a way to bring the Holodeck to VR. Thanks in part to work from Psyrek, they built a Holodeck grid for Steam VR that serves as an extremely appropriate background while you're between games. It's not going to be as vast or immersive as the "real" thing, and you'll need a compatible headset (like the HTC Vive) to even give this a try. Still, it's a pleasant reminder that science fiction and reality are much closer than they used to be.

If it wasn't already clear that Microsoft learned a few hard lessons after its Tay AI went off the deep end with racist and sexist remarks, it is now. The folks in Redmond have posted reflections on the incident that shed a little more light on both what happened and what the company learned. Believe it or not, Microsoft did stress-test its youth-like code to make sure you had a "positive experience." However, it also admits that it wasn't prepared for what would happen when it exposed Tay to a wider audience. It made a "critical oversight" that didn't account for a dedicated group exploiting a vulnerability in Tay's behavior that would make her repeat all kinds of vile statements.

SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft is "deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets" generated by its renegade artificial intelligence chatbot, Tay, which was abruptly taken offline Thursday after one day of life. The company said it will bring Tay back after engineers can plan better for hackers with "malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values," according to a blog post Friday by Peter Lee, vice president of Microsoft Research. Tay launched Wednesday with little fanfare. The experiment was aimed at 18- to 24-year-olds communicating via text, Twitter and Kik, and its AI mission was largely to engage social users in conversation. Tay was modeled on a successful chatbot launch in China, Xiaolche, that has been embraced apparently without incident by 40 million users, the post notes.

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

A Microsoft executive said Friday that the company was "deeply sorry" for the "unintended offensive and hurtful" tweets the company's Tay chatbot delivered earlier this week. "Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values," Peter Lee, the corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft Research, wrote in a blog post. While that echoes the message that Microsoft delivered earlier, Lee attempted to show how Tay wasn't simply unleashed onto the Internet without preparation. Tay was the outgrowth of a similar Microsoft chatbot known as XiaoIce, which is already "delighting" 40 million people in China, Lee explained. "The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment?" Lee wrote.