When Texas-based copywriter Dustin Ballard released a cover of Aqua's 1997 Europop hit "Barbie Girl" this summer using an AI-generated version of Johnny Cash's voice, he was surprised by its reception. "I actually expected more of a backlash," he says. Earlier this fall, when he followed up with AI Johnny Cash singing Taylor Swift's "Blank Space," the feedback was unexpectedly positive once again. "This is hauntingly beautiful," the top comment reads. "It absolutely slaps," Futurism wrote.

What is a neural network? As in the structure of a human brain, neurons are interconnected to help make decisions; neural networks are inspired by the neurons, which helps a machine make different decisions or predictions. Neural networks are the web of interconnected nodes where each node has the responsibility of simple calculations. A combination of calculation helps in bringing desired results. In today's machine learning and deep learning scenario, neural networks are among the most important fields of study growing in readiness.

An instance of the n-puzzle game consists of a board holding n 2-1 distinct movable tiles, plus an empty space. The tiles are numbers from the set 1,..,n 2-1. For any such board, the empty space may be legally swapped with any tile horizontally or vertically adjacent to it. In this assignment, the blank space is going to be represented with the number 0. Given an initial state of the board, the combinatorial search problem is to find a sequence of moves that transitions this state to the goal state; that is, the configuration with all tiles arranged in ascending order 0,1,…,n 2 1. The search space is the set of all possible states reachable from the initial state.

Headlines on artificial intelligence typically belong to globally renowned tech giants, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple. Asia's AI and machine learning startups, on the other hand, rarely make it onto the world stage. "I want a world-competitive AI company coming from Asia," says Tak Lo, the Managing Director of Zeroth, a funding program for early-stage AI and machine learning startups in Asia. "[Part] of that is taking Asian startups and being able to support them from a global network of entrepreneurs." Zeroth, which launched on July 1st, is a three month funding program that offers mentorship and 20,000 USD in capital to early-stage startups.

At the beginning of "Welcome to the 5th Façade," a science-fiction story by architect Alan Maskin, a nameless man awakes from a cryogenic freeze. It is an unspecified date in the mid-21st century, and he's been in "big sleep," as his cryonic technician puts it, since suffering a massive heart attack decades before. He finds things drastically different. Kinetic vertical farms decorate the neo-classical brick buildings that still stand. Above them rises a new layer of the city, where farms, parks, and energy-harvesting machines form a new, high-rise urban landscape.