It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Microsoft using artificial intelligence to teach a machine to stay aloft

Paying attention to the "rise of the machines" increasingly means scanning the skies for things other than conventional aircraft or birds. But what if the line between the two begins to blur and autonomous planes can somehow be taught to mimic nature? That's the hope of researchers from Microsoft who are using artificial intelligence to keep a sailplane aloft without the help of a motor. The researchers have found that through a complex set of AI algorithms, they can get their 16 1/2-foot, 12 1/2-pound aircraft to soar much like a hawk would, by identifying things like air temperature and wind direction to locate thermals -- invisible columns of air that rise due to heat. "Birds do this seamlessly, and all they're doing is harnessing nature. And they do it with a peanut-sized brain," Ashish Kapoor, a principal researcher at Microsoft, said in the report.