Teaching computers to plan for the future

As humans, we've gotten pretty good at shaping the world around us. We can choose the molecular design of our fruits and vegetables, travel faster and further and stave off life threatening diseases with personalized medical care. However, what continues to elude our molding grasp is the airy notion of "time" – how to see further than our present moment, and ultimately how to make the most of it. As it turns out, robots might be the ones who can answer this question. Computer scientists from the University of Bonn in Germany wrote this week that they were able to design a software that could predict a sequence of events up to five minutes in the future with accuracy between 15 and 40 percent.