The circles and crosses represent the object and goal positions, respectively.

With COVID-19 taking hold over the world, it compelled associations worldwide to reevaluate how they conduct business, train, and prepare their employees to address the disruption and business elements' difficulties. How are associations preparing for the coming year in reskilling and upskilling their employees? The pandemic has made unprecedented difficulties that have constrained organizations to search for alternative work types like work from home or remote working and carry virtual training to the front. Prior virtual training was utilized uniquely for the remote workforce or individuals spread across geographies. Working from home is the new normal at this point.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 8 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com Exploding enemy targets with precision artillery, "lasing" ground targets for drone air attack and waging close-combat urban warfare with hand-carried small arms -- are all scenarios entertained recently in high-tech virtual training wargame designed to closely replicate anticipated future warfare. The exercise, intended to virtually "create" high-threat, multi-domain modern warfare, was intended to move the Army closer to its goal of engineering a new "force-on-force" mobile training technology designed to prepare soldiers for the risks and perils of a new kind of war. "This was a computer-based simulation down to the individual model -- using real-time data and responding in a real-world manner," Col. Chris Cassibry, Maneuver Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate's Concepts Development Division director, recently told reporters.

That solves a challenge for robotic hands, which look like the fist of a robot from the 1980s "Terminator" science fiction film. The hands have been commercially available for years but are difficult for engineers to program. Engineers can write specific computer code for each new task, which requires a pricey new program each time. Or robots can be equipped with software that lets them "learn" through physical training.

For years, video game developers have used artificial intelligence to animate those characters encountered by a player, but non-playable characters, or NPCs, have been based on sets of rules coded by humans. Using the AI technology du jour, machine learning, future NPCs will program and reprogram their own rules, based on the experiences they encounter in games, in the process getting smarter the longer they play. So says Danny Lange, the VP of AI and machine learning at Unity Technologies, a major maker of game "engine" software that handles the underlying mechanics of titles like Firewatch and ChronoBlade. Today the company announced Unity Machine Learning Agents--open-source software linking its game engine to machine learning programs such as Google's TensorFlow. It will allow non-playable characters, through trial and error, to develop better, more creative strategies than a human could program, says Lange, using a branch of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning.