Not that he was overly excited about it: Rosenblatt told The New Yorker that he thought the machine was "of no practical use." Sixty years later we can safely say Rosenblatt underestimated his invention. True to its name, the Mark 1 in fact marked the first artificial neural network. The way it worked, simply, was this: The Mark 1 Perceptron used 400 randomly connected photocells to "see" a triangle--that is, not just capture its image the way a camera might, but in fact to "recognize" it for future reference. Today, neural networks and neurocomputing have revolutionized artificial intelligence (AI) and made great advances in deep learning possible. Their use also extends into natural language processing, speech recognition and computer vision--the very purpose of the original Perceptron.

Here's a new version of Jingle Bells you won't hear played in malls, and it's courtesy of one of the oldest computers in history. Turing archive director Jack Copeland and composer Jason Long have recreated Ferranti Mark 1's Christmas performance for the BBC back in 1951. During that broadcast, the first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer (housed at Alan Turing's Computing Machine Laboratory) performed several melodies created using the sounds it used to emit. While three of the songs were recorded, its rendition of Jingle Bells and Good King Wenceslas weren't. Thankfully, one of the engineers present during the event saved a copy of the recording, and that's what Long and Copeland used to recreate the missing Christmas tunes. They started by manually cutting up the audio to get access to the 152 individual computer-generated notes in the recording.

A troubling new video that appears to show Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot performing in a short adult film has shed startling light on what could happen when machine learning falls into the wrong hands. The video, created by Reddit user deepfakes, features a woman who takes on the rough likeness of Gadot, with the actor's face overlaid on another person's head. It was made by training a machine learning algorithm on stock photos, Google search images, and YouTube videos of the star – and experts warn the technique is'no longer rocket science.' The algorithm was trained on real porn videos and images of Gal Gadot, allowing it to create an approximation of the actor's face that can be applied to the moving figure in the video. As all of this is freely available information, it could be done without that person's consent.

We're in the Wild West of artificial intelligence development and it is indeed an exciting time. Whether you fear AI or are part of the revolution, the rapid pace of development is showing no signs of slowing down. With advanced AI solutions popping up from every corner of the United States, AI is an equal-opportunist: a national landscape for developers across the country to shine. Tech giants like IBM and Microsoft are constantly iterating artificial intelligence engines to perform tasks from object recognition to transcription, and Watson is a household name-the AI landscape leaders are set, right? The limitation of AI tech coming out of these mega-companies is usability-applying the tech to extract meaningful, actionable data. It works, but does it matter?

Mark 1 is no Amazon Echo: it looks like an '80s clock radio mashed up with WALL-E, and speaks with a robotic, bass-heavy British accent. But the startup behind it, Mycroft, hopes it has similar appeal to hackers, students, and companies who want a voice-enabled assistant that they can run on all kinds of devices and alter at will. When it comes to voice-enabled digital assistants, there are plenty of them available these days--in addition to the Echo, which runs Amazon's Alexa assistant, there's Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google's assistant. None of these is open-source, though, so even if developers can use it on various devices (like Amazon's Alexa), they can't go under the hood and change its code--ostensibly, to help improve it. Mycroft--whose voice assistant, which runs on Mark 1, is also called Mycroft--isn't trying to rival any of these big companies' digital helpers, says CEO Joshua Montgomery.

Overwrought love letters began turning up on the notice board at the University of Manchester's computer lab in August, 1953. Dripping with lustful vocabulary, they were all variations on a basic syntactic template: "YOU ARE MY [adjective] [noun]. And the signatory was always the same: "M.U.C.," for the Manchester University computer, a Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first general-purpose and commercially available machine of its kind. But the real author of the letters (in the first instance, anyway) was Christopher Strachey, a pioneering programmer. As he confessed in an article the following year, "There are many obvious imperfections in this scheme (indeed very little thought went into its devising), and the fact that the vocabulary was largely based on Roget's Thesaurus lends a very peculiar flavor to the results." For Strachey, though, the interesting thing was how a simple setup, using only about seventy base words, could produce a combinatorial explosion of results--on the order of three hundred billion different letters. The lovelorn user could run the program over and over until his fingers seized up, and never see the same letter twice. Strachey was something of an outlier, according to Martin Campbell-Kelly, a historian of computing at the University of Warwick. While scientists and mathematicians of the day typically used computers strictly for numerical calculations, like analyzing weapons trajectories or seeking prime factors of huge numbers, his fascination was with non-numerical computations--what soon became known as artificial intelligence. "Strachey grabbed hold of that much more than anybody else," Campbell-Kelly told me. The results were not always lovey-dovey. Besides training the Mark 1 to churn out billets-doux, he also taught it to play checkers ("draughts," in British parlance). If M.U.C.'s opponent made too many mistakes, it would get crotchety and print out a reprimand: "I refuse to waste any more time.

A graphic designer has created a life-like replica of actress Scarlett Johansson - which winks and giggles when he tells her she's cute. Like many children with imaginations fired by animated films, Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamed of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, he has realised his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The life-size robot was created by Hong Kong designer Ricky Ma, based on a famous Hollywood actress. Named Mark 1, Ma has programmed her to wink and say'thank you' when he tells her she is beautiful The fruit of his labours of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than $50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1.

It may be many men's dream to have Scarlett Johansson tend to their every need. But one man has come close to making this fantasy a reality by building a look-a-like robot. He now plans on sharing his designs in a handbook, so other fans can create their own sexy androids too. The life-size robot was created by Hong Kong designer Ricky Ma, based on a famous Hollywood actress. A 3D-printed skeleton lies beneath Mark 1's silicone skin, wrapping its mechanical and electronic parts.

Despite the tremendous progress we've made in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, building a robot that can convincingly emulate normal human behavior remains merely a fantasy at this stage. Some of them can speak and maybe even hold a conversation, but no robot comes close to being a real life'Ex Machina' yet. For the most part, the humanoid robots we've built so far come across as overly mechanical, unnervingly awkward and threateningly soulless… but somehow all of this creepiness makes them irresistibly fascinating. Tara the Android is perhaps the godmother of the robotic creepfest. While the video of this eerie singing mannequin was first uploaded back in 2009 and has since received over seven million views, little information is available about either Tara or her creator.

A recent article titled "Why is AI Female?" made the connection that gendered labor, in service professions in particular, is fueling our expectations for gendered AI assistants and service robots. Furthermore, the author argues, this "feminizing -- and sexualizing -- of machines" signals a future with a disproportionate use of feminized VR and robots for a male-dominated sex industry. "Sex with robots is a big leap from asking Siri to set an alarm, but the fact that we've largely equated artificial intelligence with female personalities is worth examining. There are, after all, few sexualized male robots or avatars." Herbert Televox and Mr. Telelux, the early 20th century robots made by Westinghouse, were both male.