In 1982, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott Fahlman suggested using:-) for humorous comments after his colleagues took a joke about mercury seriously. On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university's bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use:-) and:-( as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as "the inventor or at least one of the inventors" of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment. The whole episode started three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to colleagues on Carnegie Mellon's "bboard," which was an early online message board.

Former CIA station chief in Moscow Dan Hoffman breaks down two ways the United States can respond to Russia's attacks on Ukraine on'Fox Report.' In his 26th week back in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump is expected to make a "major announcement" related to Russia, hold a meeting with the NATO chief, and join a summit in Pennsylvania as America's race to lead the world on artificial intelligence continues. Trump spent the anniversary at his home in Bedminster, N.J., before traveling with first lady Melania Trump to the FIFA Club World Cup final on Sunday at MetLife Stadium in the Garden State. Trump returned to the White House on Sunday evening and is expected to have another whirlwind workweek. Trump will meet with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte this week following the U.S. president saying last week that the U.S. is selling weapons to its NATO allies for them to be passed along to Ukraine as it continues battling Russia.

This is an essay about the value of mathematical and symbolic reasoning in the age of AI.

"I'm absolutely a Luddite," the author and columnist Brian Merchant said the other day at an outdoor café in Brooklyn. He has long, brown hair and a goatee, and was wearing a plaid shirt over a T-shirt that read "The Luddites Were Right." On the chair next to him sat an HP printer. Merchant feels that the original Luddites, early-nineteenth-century cloth-makers who raided British factories and destroyed the new machines that were replacing them, have been getting a bad rap lately. Modern people tend to see them as fools who didn't appreciate the benefits of technology.

Last week, at Google's annual conference dedicated to new products and technologies, the company announced a change to its premier AI product: The Bard chatbot, like OpenAI's GPT-4, will soon be able to describe images. Although it may seem like a minor update, the enhancement is part of a quiet revolution in how companies, researchers, and consumers develop and use AI--pushing the technology not only beyond remixing written language and into different media, but toward the loftier goal of a rich and thorough comprehension of the world. ChatGPT is six months old, and it's already starting to look outdated. That program and its cousins, known as large language models, mime intelligence by predicting what words are statistically likely to follow one another in a sentence. Researchers have trained these models on ever more text--at this point, every book ever and then some--with the premise that force-feeding machines more words in different configurations will yield better predictions and smarter programs.

In the fall of 2000, as the first dot-com bubble was bursting, the Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn attended a talk, at Carnegie Mellon, about ten problems that Yahoo couldn't solve. Von Ahn, who had just begun his Ph.D., liked solving problems. He had planned to study math until he realized that many mathematicians were still toiling away over questions that had proved unanswerable for centuries. "I talked to some computer-science professors and they would say, 'Oh, yeah, I solved an open problem last week,' " he told me recently. "That seemed just a lot more interesting."

Robots in Carnegie Mellon University's Newell-Simon Hall can explore the moon, slither across the ground, crawl down pipes, and drive autonomously through deserts and cities. With the building's latest inhabitant, CMU researchers are putting autonomy to work on ice. A student team from Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute (RI), dubbed AI on Ice, has partnered with three organizations to add autonomous capabilities to a two-Zamboni-machine convoy. Locomation, a CMU spin-out company focused on bringing Human-Guided AutonomySM to long-haul trucking at scale across the U.S.; Zamboni, the company founded in 1949 that created the world's first self-propelled ice-resurfacing machine; and the Pittsburgh Penguins share the goal of using artificial intelligence to improve the consistency of ice in the rink. "The connection with the Penguins and Zamboni was made for us by local autonomous trucking spinoff, Locomation, and has led to a great project of the type our program seeks, with strong systems engineering, electromechanical, sensing and programming/control aspects," said John Dolan, a principal systems scientist in the RI and adviser on the project.

An artificial intelligence known as'Dragonfly' has been used by researchers to design more efficient batteries. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon have used the tool to design better electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries, which would allow the batteries to charge faster. An electrolyte moves ions – atoms that have been charged by either gaining or losing an electron – between the two electrodes in a battery. Lithium ions are created at the negative electrode, the anode, and flow to the cathode where they gain electrons. When a battery charges, the ions move back to the anode.

It's 1am on the west coast of America, but the Emerald Cloud Lab, just south of San Francisco, is still busy. I'm "visiting" via the camera on a chest-high telepresence robot, being driven round the 1,400 sq metre (15,000 sq ft) lab by Emerald's CEO, Brian Frezza, who is also sitting at home. There are no actual scientists anywhere, just a few staff in blue coats quietly following instructions from screens on their trolleys, ensuring the instruments are loaded with reagents and samples. Cloud labs mean anybody, anywhere can conduct experiments by remote control, using nothing more than their web browser. Experiments are programmed through a subscription-based online interface – software then coordinates robots and automated scientific instruments to perform the experiment and process the data.

A version of this article was published in TIME's newsletter Into the Metaverse. You can find past issues of the newsletter here. There are two versions of a BMW factory in the medieval town of Regensburg, Germany. One is a physical plant that cranks out hundreds of thousands of cars a year. The other is a virtual 3-D replica, accessed by screen or VR headset, in which every surface and every bit of machinery looks exactly the same as in real life.