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.