The first time I watched Gargoyles, a Disney cartoon about stone-winged creatures that come alive at night to fight evil, I was enraptured. This was something so dramatically different from anything I'd seen to that point. Thanks to Disney Plus, I had a chance to rewatch the show. My initial response 25 years later: How the hell did this show even get made? That isn't meant as a slight.

Facebook is hoping it can train an AI assistant to understand a broad range of human commands with a little help from one of the biggest games in the world -- Minecraft. A group of Facebook researchers published a paper in July explaining why they think Minecraft is the perfect place for an AI to learn about human communication. The key lies in the fact that Minecraft is what's known as a "sandbox" game, where players can roam around with relatively free rein as to what they want to do or build, while also following a set of relatively simple rules. The researchers also hope that the natural curiosity of Minecraft players will give the AI plenty of humans to practise with. "Since we work in a game environment, players may enjoy interacting with the assistants as they are developed, yielding a rich resource for human-in-the-loop research," the paper says.

As Notre Dame Cathedral's majestic spire tumbled into the inferno on Monday night, live newsreaders around the world decried the tragic loss of this 12th-century marvel. The great timber roof – nicknamed "the forest" for the thousands of trees used in its beams – was gone, the rose windows feared melted, the heart of Paris destroyed forever. What few realised in the heat of the shocking footage was that much of what was ablaze was a 19th-century fantasy. Like most buildings of this age, Notre Dame is the sum of centuries of restorations and reinventions, a muddled patchwork of myth and speculation. Standing as a sturdy hulk on the banks of the Seine, the great stone pile has never been the most elegant or commanding of the ancient cathedrals, but it became the most famous. Begun in 1163, it was larger than any gothic church before it, employing some of the first flying buttresses to allow taller, thinner walls and larger expanses of glazing – including the spectacular rose windows that projected great cosmic wheels of colour into the luminous interior. "Where would [one] find … such magnificence and perfection, so high, so large, so strong, clothed round about with such a multiple variety of ornaments?"

In recent times, computation has become both pervasive and less constrained by Moore's Law. This is due in large part to the emergence of cloud computing and the rise of massive parallelism. The former has benefited from network improvements and ever increasing connectedness, the latter from the appropriation of hardware like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for general purpose computing. This computational leap, coupled with the process of disintermediation [1] taking place around the globe will continue to support revolutions like artificial intelligence (AI), as many have remarked. AI has a long and interesting history.