E3 has returned, brought to you live via stream, offering free entry for all to make up for another year without the show's wild cosplay. If there was an overriding theme of this show, it was pandemic-related delay: A lot of the games we've been champing at the bit for are further away than expected, or made no appearance at all. If you didn't manage to catch all the conferences from the comfort of your desk chair, don't worry--sit back in relative comfort and peruse this summary of the best E3 had to offer. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Undoubtedly the moment of the show, Nintendo finally (finally) aired some gameplay footage from the sequel to its 2017 masterpiece.

This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. This is not a year we'll look back on fondly. It began with Australia on fire and ends with more than 1.5 million dead in a pandemic. But there have been bright points in this annus horribilis. While many of us saved lives by hunkering down at home watching Netflix, a communal act of selflessness that shouldn't be soon forgotten, progress was made in science, the environment, and even politics--Biden won!

Since 2009, technology has been steadily blurring which tasks are best performed by a human, and which by a machine – from smart home sensors to music made from generative algorithms and the use of artificial intelligence in places like hospitals and schools. Since the inception of WIRED UK in 2009, this world has grown and shifted in ways that would have been hard to predict – and what were once buzzwords, the offshoots of science fiction, have increasingly become a part of our everyday life. "We're in this period of a massive convergence of a number of very high level trends," says Jeremy Palmer, CEO of QuantumBlack, an advanced analytics firm which is a McKinsey company. "The amount and variety of data, computing power, infrastructure like cloud capabilities along with academic research and papers are all rapidly advancing. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are enabled by these things so we're seeing it embedded into real world applications more and more. For example, we are increasingly seeing artificial intelligence and machine learning being subsumed into industries like healthcare, education and architecture."

For arguably the most famous physicist on Earth, Stephen Hawking--who died Wednesday in Cambridge at 76 years old--was wrong a lot. He thought, for a while, that black holes destroyed information, which physics says is a no-no. He thought Cygnus X-1, an emitter of X-rays over 6,000 light years away, wouldn't turn out to be a black hole. He thought no one would ever find the Higgs boson, the particle indirectly responsible for the existence of mass in the universe. But Hawking was right a lot, too.

Take part in the first online AI study of human intelligence Put your intelligence to the ultimate test and see how you fare compared with other people. In around half an hour, the artificial intelligence developed by a team at Imperial College London – nicknamed Cognitron - will put you through a series of a dozen customised tests and, after you have supplied a few details, tell you how well you did.The online study uses web-based AI developed by neuroscientists Romy Lorenz, Rob Leech, Pete Hellyer and Adam Hampshire at Imperial's Computational, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory, 'C3NL'. The AI will harvest information from thousands of people and dozens of tests, enabling it to explore hundreds of different measures of cognitive ability.The subject of intelligence remains contentious, not least because there is still no agreement on precisely what the word means. Tthe AI will tinker with the tests to find out if intelligence can be divided into different types of cognitive ability like verbal reasoning and focused attention, or if such cognitive skills are all interdependent. Ultimately, Cognitron aims to understand if AI is the key to understanding human intelligence.

Google is launching a new project to see whether artificial intelligence can create art. In a talk at Moogfest, a US technology festival, Google researcher Douglas Eck described a project that would seek to understand whether or not a computer can create art. Magenta, which will launch in early June, is part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research. Eck said the project was in part inspired by DeepDream, an artificial intelligent system trained to find patterns in pictures. "There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," said Eck. "The question Magenta asks is, 'Can machines make music and art? If not, why not?'," he said.

Artificial intelligence can control self-driving cars, beat the best humans at incredibly complex board games, and fight cancer; but one thing it can't do perfectly is communicate. To help solve the problem, Google has been feeding it's AI with more than 11,000 unpublished books, including 3,000 steamy romance titles. "come with me," she said. "talk to me," she said. "don't worry about it," she said.

Artificial intelligence developed by a group of Australian research teams has replicated a complex experiment which won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001. The intelligent machine learned how to run a Bose-Einstein condensation – isolating an extremely cold gas inside a beam of laser light – in under an hour, something the team "didn't expect". Results have been published in the Scientific Reports journal. The algorithm has also been uploaded to GitHub for other researchers working on "quantum experiments". "A simple computer program would have taken longer than the age of the universe to run through all the combinations and work this out," said Paul Wigley, co-lead researcher of the study and professor at the School of Physics and Engineering at the Australian National University.

Thousands of genes are involved in intelligence, according to a new study which effectively shatters any hopes of eugenicists that babies can be genetically designed to be clever. In one of the largest studies of the human genome to date, a group of 253 scientists from around the world identified 74 genetic variants that are associated with the number of years spent in formal education. Humans' genetic make-up is believed to be responsible for at least 20 per cent of the difference in educational attainment between individuals, with the rest down to social factors and the environment in which they are raised. But the researchers found that the largest effect of any one genetic variant was tiny – just 0.035 per cent. This suggests that there must be at least several thousand of genes that are involved.

This article was first published in the January 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. Algorithms are already helping us to decide what to watch and listen to. But style is more complicated. "Fashion is a gnarly domain," says Kieran O'Neill, CEO and co-founder of London-based startup Thread.