An AI to make practical decisions and to play Flappy Bird ZDNet

The science of applied artificial intelligence doesn't get the same kinds of headlines as the pure research efforts of Google or Facebook or others. Mostly that's because what gets built by companies is obfuscated by those same companies, either for proprietary reasons or because the companies actually have nothing much to speak of. Last week, Babak Hodjat, who runs the machine learning operations of software giant Cognizant Technology Solutions, had something to show, so ZDNet traveled to the loft office near San Francisco's Embarcadero where Hodjat and a team of 18 staffers develop algorithms. The ostensible event was the publication, on the arXiv pre-print server, of a paper showing how Hodjat's style of machine learning could compete with the kind made famous by DeepMind's AlphaZero. Before digging into the paper, ZDNet accepted a challenge against the machine, a game of Flappy Bird.