It is now possible for machines to learn how natural or artificial systems work by simply observing them, without being told what to look for, according to researchers at the University of Sheffield. He added: "Unlike in the original Turing test, however, our interrogators are not human but rather computer programs that learn by themselves. They would not simply copy the observed behaviour, but rather reveal what makes human players distinctive from the rest." So far, Dr Gross and his team have tested Turing Learning in robot swarms but the next step is to reveal the workings of some animal collectives such as schools of fish or colonies of bees.

I learned about entropy as part of my undergraduate Physics education but it turns out that the concept of entropy turns up in many fields including linguistics, themodynamics, information theory, chemistry and artificial intelligence. As part of Sheffield's Open Data Science Initiative, computer scientist, Neil Lawrence, has teamed up with linguist, Dagmar Divjak, to organise a cross-faculty discussion meeting on the subject of entropy. For more details on the day's events, and to register, see http://opendsi.cc/ed2016/program I wasted a little time producing the above logo for the event using Mathematica. You should call it entropy, for two reasons.