Culture

Fake Aim

Gamers looking to cheat in first-person shooters can’t miss with AI-assisted marksmanship. What’s new: A video-game hack uses computer vision to blast virtual enemies at superhuman speed, Ars Technica reported.

Haters Gonna [Mute]

A new tool aims to let video gamers control how much vitriol they receive from fellow players. What’s new: Intel announced a voice recognition tool called Bleep that the

Two-Way Winner

AlphaGo Zero demonstrates superhuman performance playing Go, chess, and shogi. Models like R2D2 do the same playing classic Atari titles. A new approach to deep reinforcement learning is the first to achieve state-of-the-art

Forecasting Blockbusters

Could a black box become Hollywood’s crystal ball?What’s new: Warner Bros. is using an AI-powered tool that predicts a movie’s box-office success, according to Hollywood Reporter.

Here Be Dragons

AI is contributing to paintings, music, and now a whimsical fantasy video.What’s new: The Squire is an amateur romp through a snowy realm of knights in armor and damsels in distress. The script was composed by AI

A Smoldering Conflict Flares

A year-long Twitter feud breathed fresh life into a decades-old argument over AI’s direction.What happened: Gary Marcus, a New York University professor, author,

Simulation Substitutes for Data

The future of machine learning may depend less on amassing ground-truth data than simulating the environment in which a model will operate.What happened: Deep learning works like magic with enough high-quality

Inside AI’s Muppet Empire

As language models show increasing power, a parallel trend has received less notice: The vogue for naming models after characters in the children’s TV show Sesame Street.

Is AI Making Mastery Obsolete?

Is there any reason to continue playing games that AI has mastered? Ask the former champions who have been toppled by machines.What happened: In 2016, International Go master Lee Sedol famously lost

Survival of the Overfittest

Neuroevolution, which combines neural networks with ideas drawn from Darwin, is gaining momentum. Its advocates claim that they can achieve faster, better results by generating a succession of new models, each slightly

Who’s Minding the Store?

Amazon, watch your back. There’s a new player in the book business and, unlike Jeff Bezos, it doesn’t need eight hours of sleep a night.What’s new: The online bookstore Booksby.ai is run entirely by AI. Neural

Take That, Humans!

At the BlizzCon gaming convention last weekend, players of the strategy game StarCraft II stood in line to get walloped by DeepMind’s AI. After training for the better part of a year, the bot has become one of the world’s top players.

Cube Controversy

OpenAI trained a five-fingered robotic hand to unscramble the Rubik’s Cube puzzle, bringing both acclaim and criticism.What’s new: The AI research lab OpenAI trained a mechanical hand to

Autonomous Drones Ready to Race

Pilots in drone races fly souped-up quadcopters around an obstacle course at 120 miles per hour. But soon they may be out of a job, as race organizers try to spice things up with drones controlled by AI.

Nothing but (Neural) Net

Basketball coaches often sketch plays on a whiteboard to help players get the ball through the net. A new AI model predicts how opponents would respond to these tactics.What’s new: A team of researchers in Taiwan trained a conditional