Japan's Sony Corp said on Wednesday it has brought back AIBO more than a decade since it last made the robotic dog, as the electronics and entertainment firm seeks to rebuild its reputation for innovation after years of restructuring. The announcement comes a day after Sony confirmed its renaissance by forecasting its highest-ever profit this financial year, sending its shares surging to a nine-year high. And it confirms previous reports speculating that Sony would revive the "pet project." AIBO is billed as a pet that behaves like a real dog using artificial intelligence (AI) to learn and interact with its owner and surroundings. The upgrade sees AIBO equipped with new sensing and movement technologies as well as far more advanced AI backed by cloud computing to develop the dog's personality. Sales begin in Japan in January for 198,000 yen ($1,739).

While AlphaGo is stepping back from competitive play, it's certainly not the end of our work with the Go community, to which we owe a huge debt of gratitude for their encouragement and motivation over the past few years. We plan to publish one final academic paper later this year that will detail the extensive set of improvements we made to the algorithms' efficiency and potential to be generalised across a broader set of problems. Just like our first AlphaGo paper, we hope that other developers will pick up the baton, and use these new advances to build their own set of strong Go programs.