The Yomiuri ShimbunA short-form novel "coauthored" by humans and an artificial intelligence (AI) program passed the first screening process for a domestic literary prize, it was announced on Monday. However, the book did not win the final prize. Two teams submitted novels that were produced using AI. They held a press conference in Tokyo and made the announcement, which follows the recent victory of an AI program over a top Go player from South Korea. These achievements strongly suggest a dramatic improvement in AI capabilities. The following sentences come from the end of one of the the novels, "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" (The day a computer writes a novel): "I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement.

After allocating books to either training, validation or test sets, we formed example'questions' from chapters in the book by enumerating 21 consecutive sentences. In each question, the first 20 sentences form the context, and a word is removed from the 21st sentence, which becomes the query. Models must identify the answer word among a selection of 10 candidate answers appearing in the context sentences and the query.

Microsoft's attempt at engaging millennials with artificial intelligence has backfired hours into its launch, with waggish Twitter users teaching its chatbot how to be racist. The company launched a verified Twitter account for "Tay" – billed as its "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill" – early on Wednesday. The chatbot, targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US, was developed by Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding". "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," Microsoft said. "The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets."

The German car manufacturer admitted cheating emissions tests. Which companies are impacted directly or indirectly by these revelations? James Phare from Data To Value used graph analysis and open source information to unravel the impact of the VW scandal on its customers, partners and shareholders. Since September 18 when VW admitted to modifying its cars to disguise their true emissions performances, the news has made headlines worldwide. In all this noise, it's difficult to piece together the important information necessary to assess the event's impact.

Just last week, an evil, god-like robot defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol, a tragic accomplishment that seemed decades away in 2012. In some ways it completed the Triple Crown of robot-fun-killing which began with Garry Kasparov's defeat at the hands of DeepBlue in 1997 and continued with the ritual slaughter of Ken Jennings on Jeopardy in 2011. And now, the robots are coming for our books. As reported by Japan News, researchers from Japan's Future University Hakodate have announced that a book co-written by team members and artificial intelligence made it onto the long list of the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The prize itself is somewhat unique.

The investment round is comprised of angel investors as well as full board and founder participation. The funding will allow DimensionalMechanics to accelerate platform development and expand its diverse team of AI experts, engineers, mathematicians, physicists and others. DimensionalMechanics is on track to release an MVP version of its core platform, NeoPulse, in the fourth quarter of 2016. Still in early stages of development, NeoPulse is an extensible cloud platform that will enable developers to build limitless applications. The agnostic platform will work across systems and devices, allowing users to integrate AI capabilities without restructuring existing software stacks and workflows.

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.

These 14 robots receive their train thanks to convolutional neural networks, and they share their knowledge with their fellows.

Tom Popomaronis is the founder and CEO of OpiaTalk. Have you tried the Quartz News app, yet? Imagine a text conversation with a bot that sends you a news topic. You're then presented with two choices: Either tap a string of relevant (and surprisingly entertaining) emojis, which is like pressing "learn more," or tap an "anything else?" button to have another topic served: If you opt for the emojis, the app sends 1-3 follow-on texts that provide a high-level summary of the story and link to the article. If you're lucky, you'll even see a pertinent and entertaining gif in the mix for added value. When it comes to news apps in general, I like to scroll through a daily aggregator feed I've personalized to my liking; I usually don't want someone else telling me which news stories to pay attention to -- especially not one at a time.

This is not Microsoft's first teen-girl chatbot either - they have already launched Xiaoice, a girly assistant or "girlfriend" reportedly used by 20m people, particularly men, on Chinese social networks WeChat and Weibo. Xiaoice is supposed to "banter" and gives dating advice to many lonely hearts. Microsoft has come under fire recently for sexism, when they hired women wearing very little clothing which was said to resemble'schoolgirl' outfits at the company's official game developer party, so they probably want to avoid another sexism scandal.