Humans have been captivated by the concept of artificial intelligence for a long time. Movies like the Terminator, The Matrix, and even Wall-E are popular because they spark an interesting debate around themes such as ethics and philosophy while providing a visual representation of what some people believe an AI-ruled society would look like. The idea of machines that can not only complete tasks and make our lives easier, but also catapult civilization into an impossibly sophisticated future is thrilling. In fact, AI is projected to increase business labor productivity by up to 40%, which will open up more time for people to tackle more important tasks. And as companies around the world work tirelessly to make our wildest imaginings a reality, there are already several breakthroughs we can get excited about.

Facebook researchers taught the company's artificial intelligence software how to play a Solitaire-like card game that requires players to work together. Researchers at Facebook have taught the company's artificial intelligence (AI) software how to play the game Hanabi, a Solitaire-like card game that requires players to work together. Hanabi is viewed as a capable testbed for AI because it requires teamwork and strategy. The Facebook researchers had to find a way to give the Hanabi bots a method to understand the hints of their teammate bots, based on the limited information they have about their own cards. The researchers helped the bots using a variant of the Monte Carlo "search" technology technique to help them evaluate their possible moves.

What do Montezuma's Revenge, chess, and shogi have in common? They're considered to be "grand challenges" in artificial intelligence (AI) research -- i.e., games that involve elements of complex, nearly human-level problem-solving. But as AI continues to make gains in these and other benchmarks once considered beyond the reach of machines, scientists at Google Brain (Google's AI research division) and Google subsidiary DeepMind are turning their attention to a new domain: the card game Hanabi. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org Hanabi is deceptively complex, they explain: Its two-to-five-person setting necessitates not only cooperative gameplay, but the ability to reason with one's own mental state about opponents' intentions.