The second we get in the car, my son strikes up his familiar tune. "I want my playlist, Mum!" Put your belt on, young man. I get a second's sweet peace as I hear the clunk-click. I need my playlist right now!" The playlist of my nearly-nine-year-old's favourite pop songs, usually on shuffle, starts to shake through the car. I give in to his nagging often, but I know why I do. I remember the joy of becoming a music fan, discovering new sounds, worlds and ideas through verses and choruses, through the giddy rushes of rhythms and melodies. I also know that my experiences were very different to his. At his age, I had to hang around the radio for hours or wait until Top of the Pops every Thursday, hoping that a song I loved would appear. These days, my son just asks Alexa. By my early teens, if I wanted to own an album, the process was a little more convoluted: save £9.99 of pocket money, beg my mum to drive me to Woolworths five miles away, pray that they had it, and if they did, play it ...

About a year ago I tried to bond with my 17-year-old over Sea of Thieves. Since then, he has harangued me about trying Outer Wilds, which he claims is the most profound gameplaying experience of his life. I have delayed to Hamletesque degrees: what will I do if another of his favourite games doesn't connect with me? Would that mean I can no longer connect with my son? As I discovered last month, it can sometimes be a struggle playing games in your 50s, and dropping down the difficulty can reduce the stress and help me enjoy myself more.

Bayesian approaches developed to solve the optimal design of sequential experiments are mathematically elegant but computationally challenging. Recently, techniques using amortization have been proposed to make these Bayesian approaches practical, by training a parameterized policy that proposes designs efficiently at deployment time. However, these methods may not sufficiently explore the design space, require access to a differentiable probabilistic model and can only optimize over continuous design spaces. Here, we address these limitations by showing that the problem of optimizing policies can be reduced to solving a Markov decision process (MDP). We solve the equivalent MDP with modern deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our experiments show that our approach is also computationally efficient at deployment time and exhibits state-of-the-art performance on both continuous and discrete design spaces, even when the probabilistic model is a black box.

Every once in a while, I'll open something up that hasn't seen the light of day for a while. It always yields discoveries, forgotten memories and much more. Sometimes I'll open something up because it needs to be cleaned or fixed, as was the case recently with my father's 1955 Seeberg jukebox, long sitting idle in the basement. As with anything that is aging and has moving parts, it needed some care, my father long having left this life and his jukebox behind. A rare quiet hour with a piece of your childhood can reveal much.

All three a virtual tie, but each had questions they couldn't answer. Tune in to find out where Apple, Google and Amazon fell down. An Amazon Echo Dot is displayed on Sept. 27, 2017, in Seattle. You're probably thinking that the last person I wanted to endure a heat wave with last week was my 91-year-old father. But I drove out to Long Island anyway, leaving the oppressive heat of the Garden State for the the unrelenting crankiness of dear old Dad.

Today's deals make great gifts. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. This one, in particular, is jammed packed with Father's Day and scrambling for last-minute gifts. Thankfully, Amazon has deals and price drops on some of our favorite products, so you can get a nice present without emptying his wallet.

LONDON: Artificial intelligence is set to swell the GCC and Egypt's economies to the tune of $320 billion by 2030, according to a report.Globally, the economic uplift could be to the magnitude of $15.7 trillion, more than the current output of China and India combined, according to a report by professional services firm PwC. Within that increase, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity, while $9.1 trillion is likely to come from benefits to consumers....

John Markoff The New York Times Originally posted November 27, 2016 Here is an excerpt: Dr. Schmidhuber also has a grand vision for A.I. -- that self-aware or "conscious machines" are just around the corner -- that causes eyes to roll among some of his peers. To put a fine point on the debate: Is artificial intelligence an engineering discipline, or a godlike field on the cusp of creating a new superintelligent species? Dr. Schmidhuber is firmly in the god camp. He maintains that the basic concepts for such technologies already exist, and that there is nothing magical about human consciousness. "Generally speaking, consciousness and self-awareness are overrated," he said, arguing that machine consciousness will emerge from more powerful computers and software algorithms much like those he has already designed.