Artificial intelligence developer DeepMind has produced an AI program that can best any human — and any game-playing program, for that matter — in a number of classic board games. This new AI, called AlphaZero, is based on an earlier program called AlphaGo, the AI that defeated Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016, but is now proficient in the games of chess, Go, and shogi. But unlike its Go-dominating predecessor, of which required extensive programming to achieve its successes, AlphaZero wasn’t programmed in its mastery of the three classic games; instead, it taught itself.
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 One of the key challenges in facing a rapidly-changing climate is accurately predicting how global warming will affect individual regions around the planet: one area may suddenly be stricken with prolonged drought, while another may be inundated with catastrophic flooding. Keeping ahead of potentially disastrous conditions that can lead to situations such as these will be required for policy makers and emergency planners if they are to save lives and livelihoods, but our current climate models still appear to be inadequate in providing the fine details needed. The solution: according to a professor at Columbia University, the secret to our survival lies in the branch of artificial intelligence called machine learning.
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Computer scientists at Canada’s University of Alberta have used artificial intelligence to decipher the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Although computer-based cryptoanalysis has been used since World War II to crack innumerable codes, in recent years computers have been pitted against a number of enigmatic texts, such as the seventeenth-century Letter from the Devil, and now the use of AI has unveiled the meaning behind the Voynich codex, yielding some surprising results.
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Researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University have developed a new artificial intelligence program that can be used to decode human thought patterns, translating brain scans into pictures of not only what the subject is looking at, but also simply remembering, into digital images that can be reviewed.
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