She joined as senior reporter in April 2014 having previously worked as assistant editor at Government Computing. This week saw an artificial intelligence system built by Google-owned AI company DeepMind called'AlphaGo' beat South Korean champion Lee Sedol at the fiendishly complex game'Go'. Sedol won just one game to AlphaGo's four across a five-match series. The success has been touted as a milestone in AI development due to Go's complexity: it managed to win at a game where there are more possible moves than atoms in the observable universe. DeepMind's technique differs from using traditional'brute force' computing power to win. Its deep learning technology allows it to work out general rules from large quantities of data.

If you haven't heard of Mycroft, there's a good chance you've been living under a rock. Mycroft is a project over at Indiegogo and Kickstarter that has the distinction of being the first truly open source, open hardware home AI to grace the technological landscape. And, of course, it runs GNU/Linux. Mycroft is designed to respond to natural human language and execute functions based on what you say/it hears. This allows it to integrate with an array of online sites like YouTube, Netflix, Pandora, and Spotify (along with many others) so you can find content/control those sites with the ease of voice.

Last week, machine learning took a big leap forward when Google's AlphaGo, a machine algorithm, beat the world champion, Lee Sedol, in the game Go. If the lip-reading technology had been used during the 2006 World Cup Final, when Zinedine Zidane was given a red card for headbutting Marco Materazzi, the outcome of the game could have been different. The partnership will provide students within the university's Department of Computing Science the opportunity to gain hands-on experience of IBM's … A new study reveals that voice assistant AIs, like Siri and Cortana, might be clever, but they lack fundamental empathy at their core. Google has entered into the machine learning market with the alpha release of Cloud Machine Learning. "Extraordinary" merger of machine intelligence and cloud economics, is changing business operations and society, says Leading Edge Forum.

It may be time to add'novelist' to the list of professions under threat from super-smart computer software, because a short story authored by artificial intelligence has made it through to the latter stages of a literary competition in Japan. The AI software isn't self-aware enough to think up and submit its own work though (not yet, anyway) – the short-form novel was written with the help of a team of researchers from the Future University Hakodate in Japan. Human beings selected certain words and phrases to be used, and set up an overall framework for the story, before letting the software come up with the text itself. One of two submissions from the university made it through the first round of the Nikkei Shinichi Hoshi Literary Award ceremony – perhaps the entry's title, which translates as The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, should have been enough to tip the judges off – but the competition is unique in that it openly accepts entries from non-human writers (Shinichi Hoshi himself was a science-fiction author). Of 1,450 or so novels accepted this year, 11 were written with the involvement of AI programs, the Japan News reports.

Turing's test caused wide unrest, Is Siri a machine or our silicon mistress? Minsky surmised, we're mechanically comprised, Man and Bot are the same, we don't need your stupid test. John Searle replied, it's a Chinese Room inside, It's a program not consciousness. "The Singularity, meanwhile," says Ray Kurzweil, "Gives us 30 years at best." There's nothing Deep Mind cannot rule by observation and brute force.

You might want to take the help of artificial intelligence. Developed by scientists in Japan, a super-smart AI robot recently authored a short story, with some assistance from humans. What is more, the work has made it through the initial stages of screening, as part of a literary competition. While the feat is a testament to the fast-improving capabilities of artificial intelligence, the software isn't completely self-aware when it comes to articulating coherent thoughts using words, and creating original pieces of literature. The short novel, titled "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" (meaning'the day a computer writes a novel'), was composed with help from scientists at Japan's Future University Hakodate.

Human beings begin to learn the difference before we learn to speak--and thankfully so. We owe much of our success as a species to our capacity for moral reasoning. It's the glue that holds human social groups together, the key to our fraught but effective ability to cooperate. We are (most believe) the lone moral agents on planet Earth--but this may not last. The day may come soon when we are forced to share this status with a new kind of being, one whose intelligence is of our own design. Robots are coming, that much is sure. They are coming to our streets as self-driving cars, to our military as automated drones, to our homes as elder-care robots--and that's just to name a few on the horizon (Ten million households already enjoy cleaner floors thanks to a relatively dumb little robot called the Roomba). What we don't know is how smart they will eventually become. Some believe human-level artificial intelligence is pure science fiction; others believe they will far surpass us in intelligence--and sooner rather than later.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has existed as a defined concept since the 1950's when Alan Turing created a standard for what determined a machine to be "intelligent." Since then, AI has evolved and new applications have emerged in various industries. Now, AI is being integrated with other technologies and used in a number of different ways like data storytelling. For example, financial services organizations are now using AI for automated portfolio review. To learn more about how AI has changed throughout the years, check out our infographic!

Caleb comes face to face with the future of artificial intelligence.

OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl?