It was a Monday afternoon in June 2023 when Rita Meier, 45, joined us for a video call. Meier told us about the last time she said goodbye to her husband, Stefan, five years earlier. He had been leaving their home near Lake Constance, Germany, heading for a trade fair in Milan. Meier recalled how he hesitated between taking his Tesla Model S or her BMW. He had never driven the Tesla that far before. He checked the route for charging stations along the way and ultimately decided to try it. Rita had a bad feeling. She stayed home with their three children, the youngest less than a year old. At 3.18pm on 10 May 2018, Stefan Meier lost control of his Model S on the A2 highway near the Monte Ceneri tunnel. "The collision with the guardrail launches the vehicle into the air, where it flips several times before landing," investigators would write later. The car came to rest more than 70 metres away, on the opposite side of the road, leaving a trail of wreckage. Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn't unlock the car. When they heard explosions and saw flames through the windows, they retreated. Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn.

Proof planning considers mathematical theorem proving as a planning problem. It has enabled the derivation of mathematical theorems that lay outside the scope of traditional logic-based theorem proving systems. One of its strengths comes from heuristic mathematical knowledge that restricts the search space and thereby facilitates the proving process for problems whose proofs belong in the restricted search space. But this may exclude solutions or restrict the kinds of proofs that can be found for a given problem. We take a different perspective and investigate problem classes for which little or no heuristic control knowledge is available and test the usage of randomization and restart techniques.

Sid Meier is famous for creating the video game Civilization. He's also known for having his name on the box. Meier released Civilization thirty years ago this month, after developing it with Bruce Shelley, a veteran board-game designer. The pair were inspired by the illustrated history books you might find on a middle-school library shelf, and by titles like Seven Cities of Gold (1984), a video game of Spanish conquest created by the designer Danielle Berry. In Civilization, you start with a covered wagon on a map that is largely obscured. You learn metalwork, horse riding, feudalism, democracy, and diplomatic relations. Eventually, the rest of the world is revealed--a patchwork of nations.

Logic-based argumentation is a well-established formalism modelling nonmonotonic reasoning. It has been playing a major role in AI for decades, now. Informally, a set of formulas is the support for a given claim if it is consistent, subset-minimal, and implies the claim. In such a case, the pair of the support and the claim together is called an argument. In this paper, we study the propositional variants of the following three computational tasks studied in argumentation: ARG (exists a support for a given claim with respect to a given set of formulas), ARG-Check (is a given set a support for a given claim), and ARG-Rel (similarly as ARG plus requiring an additionally given formula to be contained in the support). ARG-Check is complete for the complexity class DP, and the other two problems are known to be complete for the second level of the polynomial hierarchy (Parson et al., J. Log. Comput., 2003) and, accordingly, are highly intractable. Analyzing the reason for this intractability, we perform a two-dimensional classification: first, we consider all possible propositional fragments of the problem within Schaefer's framework (STOC 1978), and then study different parameterizations for each of the fragment. We identify a list of reasonable structural parameters (size of the claim, support, knowledge-base) that are connected to the aforementioned decision problems. Eventually, we thoroughly draw a fine border of parameterized intractability for each of the problems showing where the problems are fixed-parameter tractable and when this exactly stops. Surprisingly, several cases are of very high intractability (paraNP and beyond).

One billion hours, veteran game designer Sid Meier notes in this light and enjoyable memoir, is an unfathomable length of time. And yet it took just six years for players to spend a billion cumulative hours on the fifth iteration of Meier's engrossing Civilization series, a nation-building game that has seen them shepherding their peoples from the foundation of their first city in 4000BC to an eventual victory through military, cultural or scientific might, millions of times over. What makes the Civilzation games so compelling? The fans are a cut above; I'd know as I am one of them, having racked up 530 hours on Civilization VI since I bought it at the beginning of lockdown. For Meier, good game design comes down, at its core, to a series of "interesting decisions".

Facebook's hexapod, Daisy, learning to walk On the rooftop of the building that houses the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) lab in Mountain View, California, there is a bootcamp for robots where the sun beams down on Daisy, a hexapod who is learning how to walk on a dirt jogging path. Her foot has become stuck in mulch as she struggles to wrestle free. A team of Facebook AI researchers eagerly look on, watching to see what she will do next as she moves forward with the curiosity and experimentation of a toddler. One flight down, Daisy's counterpart Pluto, a red arm robot, is learning how to reach for an object in its playpen. Facebook is leading an effort to teach robots how to think for themselves and develop human-like intuition that will enable them to navigate unknown circumstances.

Much of our work in robotics is focused on self-supervised learning, in which systems learn directly from raw data so they can adapt to new tasks and new circumstances,

Volkswagen has held its first Future Training Forum in Wolfsburg to discuss issues including the digitalization of its vocational training programmes and future learning environments. Conference participants included board members, human resources managers, training experts, Works Council members, young people's representatives and apprentices, and Volkswagen plans to repeat this exercise each year at different plants. Around 50 apprentices presented and explained some of the projects they were participating in, including e-learning on i-Pads they had received; the pilot'eKISS' mobile maintenance project involving collaboration with IT specialists on app design, development and implementation; and the use of augmented reality goggles. AR goggles are being used in training procedures for directly targeted information and assistance, and are said to promote self-teaching skills. A further program underway is called Nano-Bug, and in this, apprentices are encouraged to develop a understanding of the latest digitalization technologies, including the programming of microcontrollers.

From hurricanes to wildfires, 2017 brought the world a number of natural disasters -- as well as some tech to deal with them. We have more information than ever following a disaster thanks to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sophisticated satellites that can capture images of disasters from the air, but we are still working on ways to process the data so it is valuable for relief efforts. That's where deep learning comes in, says the World Bank in collaboration with WeRobotics and OpenAerialMap. On Jan. 10, 2018, World Bank issued an artificial intelligence (AI) challenge to explore how deep learning could be used in the wake of natural disasters. Deep learning is what enables AI to recognize patterns in images, sounds, and other data using a neural network that mirrors our own grey matter.

A nonprofit group is testing this drone to see how fast it could get medications from a town to a remote village in Peru that's six hours away by boat. A nonprofit group is testing this drone to see how fast it could get medications from a town to a remote village in Peru that's six hours away by boat. If a snake bites you in a remote Amazonian village like Pampa Hermosa, Peru, and the local doctor is out of the right anti-venom, it might be wise to prepare some goodbyes. The nearest resupply, in a town called Contamana, is up to six hours away by riverboat, and you might not last that long. But you might last 35 minutes, the travel time between Pampa Hermosa and Contamana as the drone flies. A single unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV could dart over the lush canopy with a vial of lifesaving anti-venom, and a nonprofit called WeRobotics is trying to make that a reality.