Question answering (QA) is one of the most common NLP tasks that relates to named entity recognition, fact extraction, semantic search and some other fields. In industry, it is much appreciated in chatbots and corporate information systems. It is also a challenging task that attracted the attention of a very general audience at the quiz show Jeopardy! In this article we describe a Jeopardy!-like Russian QA data set collected from the official Russian quiz database Chgk (che ge ka). The data set includes 379,284 quiz-like questions with 29,375 from the Russian analogue of Jeopardy! - "Own Game". We observe its linguistic features and the related QA-task. We conclude about perspectives of a QA competition based on the data set collected from this database.

Humans have firmly retained their lead over robots at table tennis for over 40 years, but recent advancements at Google DeepMind suggest our days of dominance may be numbered. As detailed in a preprint paper released on August 7, researchers have designed the first-ever robotic system capable of amateur human-level performance in ping pong--and there are videos to prove it. Researchers often opt for classic games like chess and Go to test the strategic capabilities of artificial intelligence--but when it comes to combining strategy and real-time physicality, a longtime robotics' industry standard is table tennis. Engineers have pitted machines against humans in countless rounds of ping pong for more than four decades due to the sport's intense computational and physical requirements involving rapid adaptation to dynamic variables, complex motions, and visual coordination. "The robot has to be good at low level skills, such as returning the ball, as well as high level skills, like strategizing and long-term planning to achieve a goal," Google DeepMind explained in an announcement thread posted to X.

After decades of serving as the named inspiration for the beloved franchise The Legend of Zelda, the series' titular princess is finally getting her own game. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, releasing September 26 for Nintendo Switch, gives Zelda her very own hero's journey after Link goes missing. But it does not, sadly, give her her own sword. Players have been clamoring for Hyrule's favorite princess to take the lead in a Zelda game for years now, or at least to be playable in games like Tears of the Kingdom. Excitement around Zelda's triumph was immediately evident on X after Nintendo announced the game Tuesday during one of its Direct presentations.

In what can only bode poorly for our species' survival during the inevitable robot uprisings, an AI system has once again outperformed the people who trained it. This time, researchers at the University of Zurich in partnership with Intel, pitted their "Swift" AI piloting system against a trio of world champion drone racers -- none of whom could best its top time. Swift is the culmination of years of AI and machine learning research by the University of Zurich. In 2021, the team set an earlier iteration of the flight control algorithm that used a series of external cameras to validate its position in space in real-time, against amateur human pilots, all of whom were easily overmatched in every lap of every race during the test. That result was a milestone in its own right as, previously, self-guided drones relied on simplified physics models to continually calculate their optimum trajectory, which severely lowered their top speed.

Over the past year, machine learning and artificial intelligence technology have made significant strides. Specialized algorithms, including OpenAI's DALL-E, have demonstrated the ability to generate images based on text prompts with increasing canniness. Natural language processing (NLP) systems have grown closer to approximating human writing and text. And some people even think that an AI has attained sentience. And as Ars' Matt Ford recently pointed out here, artificial intelligence may be artificial, but it's not "intelligence"--and it certainly isn't magic.

On June 20, Microsoft-owned Mojang announced that NFTs and blockchain technology would no longer be allowed to "integrate" with Minecraft. That was bad news for NFT Worlds, which has spent months building an entire crypto-economy on top of a collection of the randomized seeds needed to make specific Minecraft maps. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. Now, the team behind NFT Worlds announced it will create a new game that's "based on many of the core mechanics of Minecraft" but which will be "completely untethered from the policy enforcement Microsoft and Mojang have over Minecraft."

Bill Gates famously described bridge as'one of the last games in which the computer is not better'. But the Microsoft co-founder will be eating his words this week, following the news that an artificial intelligence bot has managed to beat not just one, but eight world champion bridge players at the game. French startup NukkAI spent four years developing the AI bot, called NooK, which took home the crown at the two-day Nukkai Challenge in Paris last week. In bridge, each of the four players, split into two teams, receives 13 cards in a hand. While other AI systems are typically trained by playing billions of rounds of a game, NooK was trained using a hybrid approach.

Popular modders are able to find jobs in the gaming industry because they've proven they can design features fans want to add to their game, says Alex Velicky, a design lead at Bungie, the developer behind the popular multiplayer franchise "Destiny." Velicky would know -- he got his job at Bungie after he created an entire island for "Skyrim" with a full cast of voice actors, which has been downloaded more than 3 million times. Growing up, Velicky always used to build miniature campaigns in "Age of Empires 2" and "Timesplitters 2″ but Bethesda's creator kit from "Skyrim" and "Oblivion" -- an earlier title set in the same world 200 years before the events in "Skyrim" -- felt like the first time he could really build anything in a game.

Learn the basics of the most used Artificial Intelligence techniques in videogame development. Welcome to this Intermediate course designed for developers who want to learn the basics of the most Artificial Intelligence techniques. In this course we will learn how to implement some of the most popular AI techniques in Unity, we will learn how they work by creating a simple demo in each section. Unity already comes with some packages that will let you add AI Agents to your games without any effort. We will go beyond with cool AI such as FSM, Behavior Trees, Sensors, Flocking, and a GOAP System.

An artificial intelligence equipped robot named'Curly' beat one of the world's best curling teams by quickly adapting to changes in the ice, its developers claim. The sport of curling involves constantly changing and uncontrollable environmental conditions - providing the perfect'test bed' for an AI-driven robot. Curly, who delivers the stone but doesn't sweep, won three out of four official matches against the Korean Olympic silver-medal winning women's team. The robot was developed by researchers from Korea University, who said this development narrows the gap between computer simulators and the real world. It's hoped the deep learning techniques developed for Curly could be applied to other robots that need to work'in the real world' and adapt to changing conditions.