The connected fitness boom of pandemic-era lockdowns is long behind us (hopefully), but Growl, a new startup, is still looking to bolt a workout to the wall of your home. Think of Tonal, except instead of resistance training, it's a boxing-inspired heavy bag session. The wall-mounted Growl is, according to the company, powered by AI and Unreal Engine and appears to have overhead projectors, which beam the image of a life-sized coach onto the convex punching surface. Besides the projection, the bag has an interactive coaching system to help motivate users. It also supposedly supports side-by-side training, which works great for training partners.

"thwop," "muah" and "boop" are some of the sounds made by Humpback Whales. This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. From the "boing" of a minke whale to the "drum" of a red piranha, scientists are documenting more sounds in our world's oceans, rivers and lakes every year. Now, a team of experts wants to go a step further and create a reference library of aquatic noise to monitor the health of marine ecosystems. The Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS) will include every "thwop," "muah" and "boop" of a humpback whale, as well as human-made underwater sounds and records of the geophysical swirl of ice and wind, according to a paper in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Communication changes the beliefs of the listener and of the speaker. The value of a communicative act stems from the valuable belief states which result from this act. To model this we build on the Interactive POMDP (IPOMDP) framework, which extends POMDPs to allow agents to model others in multi-agent settings, and we include communication that can take place between the agents to formulate Communicative IPOMDPs (CIPOMDPs). We treat communication as a type of action and therefore, decisions regarding communicative acts are based on decision-theoretic planning using the Bellman optimality principle and value iteration, just as they are for all other rational actions. As in any form of planning, the results of actions need to be precisely specified. We use the Bayes' theorem to derive how agents update their beliefs in CIPOMDPs; updates are due to agents' actions, observations, messages they send to other agents, and messages they receive from others. The Bayesian decision-theoretic approach frees us from the commonly made assumption of cooperative discourse - we consider agents which are free to be dishonest while communicating and are guided only by their selfish rationality. We use a simple Tiger game to illustrate the belief update, and to show that the ability to rationally communicate allows agents to improve efficiency of their interactions.

His stomach growls with hunger pangs and hastily he grunts out the words, "Large pep pizza and a liter of soda." Instantly the home virtual assistant comes to life and repeats back in an eerily human voice. "Bob, you want a large pepperoni pizza and a liter of soda correct?" "Yeah," grunts the man as he dials in a new show on his remote and pours the remaining crumbs of the potato chip bag into his mouth. Quickly the AI assistant calls the local pizza parlor and a friendly "employee" answers. "Speedy Pizza, how may I help you?" "Hi, I'd like to place an order for a large pepperoni pizza and a liter of soda for delivery," requests Bob's AI assistant in a cheerful and pleasant demeanor.

We work out a quantum-theoretic model in complex Hilbert space of a recently performed test on co-occurrencies of two concepts and their combination in retrieval processes on specific corpuses of documents. The test violated the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of the Bell inequalities ('CHSH inequality'), thus indicating the presence of entanglement between the combined concepts. We make use of a recently elaborated 'entanglement scheme' and represent the collected data in the tensor product of Hilbert spaces of the individual concepts, showing that the identified violation is due to the occurrence of a strong form of entanglement, involving both states and measurements and reflecting the meaning connection between the component concepts. These results provide a significant confirmation of the presence of quantum structures in corpuses of documents, like it is the case for the entanglement identified in human cognition.

We show that data collected from corpuses of documents violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell's inequality (CHSH inequality) and therefore indicate the presence of quantum entanglement in their structure. We obtain this result by considering two concepts and their combination and coincidence operations consisting of searches of co-occurrences of exemplars of these concepts in specific corpuses of documents. Measuring the frequencies of these co-occurrences and calculating the relative frequencies as approximate probabilities entering in the CHSH inequality, we obtain manifest violations of the latter for all considered corpuses of documents. In comparing these violations with those analogously obtained in an earlier work for the same combined concepts in psychological coincidence experiments with human participants, also violating the CHSH inequality, we identify the entanglement as being carried by the meaning connection between the two considered concepts within the combination they form. We explain the stronger violation for the corpuses of documents, as compared to the violation in the psychology experiments, as being due to the superior meaning domain of the human mind and, on the other side, to the latter reaching a broader domain of meaning and being possibly also actively influenced during the experimentation. We mention some of the issues to be analyzed in future work such as the violations of the CHSH inequality being larger than the `Cirel'son bound' for all of the considered corpuses of documents.

Since dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, we've never experienced them as living, breathing animals. We can look at their bones in a museum, or we can watch recreations of them in films like this summer's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. But both those options lack that visceral feel you get from seeing a real creature in a zoo. Though it's unlikely you'll ever live long enough to see a dinosaur in the flesh, you can still pretend to have one as a pet, thanks to Mattel's new Alpha Training Blue robot. She roars, coos and even responds to your commands like her movie inspiration -- but is far less deadly.

In just ten years time your dog could talk to you instead of barking, according to leading experts. Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning mean the Dr Dolittle dream of communicating with animals could soon be a reality. One researcher is currently collecting thousands of videos of dogs barking, growling and moving around, and is using them to teach an algorithm to understand canine communication. Professor Con Slobodchikoff from Northern Arizona University is developing new technology that interprets the calls of the prairie dog and says it could eventually be used to interpret other animals. North American rodents prairie dogs have a sophisticated ways of calling group members and alerting them to danger.

Partially observable stochastic games (POSGs) are an attractive model for many multi-agent domains, but are computationally extremely difficult to solve. We present a new model, Markov games of incomplete information (MGII) which imposes a mild restriction on POSGs while overcoming their primary computational bottleneck. Finally we show how to convert a MGII into a continuous but bounded fully observable stochastic game. MGIIs represents the most general tractable model for multi-agent reinforcement learning to date.