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Stunning AI Breakthrough Takes Us One Step Closer to the Singularity

Remember AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence to defeat a grandmaster at Go? Well, the program just got a major upgrade, and it can now teach itself how to dominate the game without any human intervention. But get this: In a tournament that pitted AI against AI, this juiced-up version, called AlphaGo Zero, defeated the regular AlphaGo by a whopping 100 games to 0, signifying a major advance in the field. Hear that? It’s the technological singularity inching ever closer.

A new paper published in Nature today describes how the artificially intelligent system that defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016 got its digital ass kicked by a new-and-improved version of itself. And it didn’t just lose by a little—it couldn’t even muster a single win after playing a hundred games. Incredibly, it took AlphaGo Zero (AGZ) just three days to train itself from scratch and acquire literally thousands of years of human Go knowledge simply by playing itself. The only input it had was what it does to the positions of the black and white pieces on the board. In addition to devising completely new strategies, the new system is also considerably leaner and meaner than the original AlphaGo.

Now, every once in a while the field of AI experiences a “holy shit” moment, and this would appear to be one of those moments. Looking back, other “holy shit” moments include Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, IBM’s Watson defeating two of the world’s best Jeopardy! champions in 2011, the aforementioned defeat of Lee Sedol in 2016, and most recently, the defeat of four professional no-limit Texas hold’em poker players at the hands of Libratus, an AI developed by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University.

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China to build giant facial recognition database to identify any citizen within seconds

However, some researchers said it was unclear when the system would be completed, as the development was encountering many difficulties due to the technical limits of facial recognition technology and the large population base.


Project aims to achieve an accuracy rate of 90 per cent but faces formidable technological hurdles and concerns about security.

PUBLISHED : Thursday, 12 October, 2017, 9:01pm.

UPDATED : Friday, 13 October, 2017, 4:10pm.

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Liquid metal brings soft robotics a step closer

Scientists have invented a way to morph liquid metal into physical shapes.

Researchers at the University of Sussex and Swansea University have applied electrical charges to manipulate liquid metal into 2D shapes such as letters and a heart.

The team says the findings represent an “extremely promising” new class of materials that can be programmed to seamlessly change shape. This open up new possibilities in ‘soft robotics’ and shape-changing displays, the researcher say.

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‘Postbiological’ alien civilisation that survives using AI could exist

Are AI aliens watching Earth? An immortal machine civilization could already exist and may be BILLIONS of years old, leading expert claims…


Artificial intelligence could already exist elsewhere in the universe and may have been around for billions of years, according to a leading expert.

Susan Schneider of the University of Connecticut believes other civilisations could rely on forms of alien super-intelligence we haven’t yet created on Earth.

She claims these life-forms could be ‘post-biological’ and not driven by the propagation of genes like creatures on Earth but powered by technology — meaning they could be immortal too.

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AI nano-machines could be injected into our brains within 20 years

AI machines injected into our bodies could give us superhuman strength and let us control gadgets using the power of THOUGHT within 20 years…


Humans could be ‘melded’ to machines, giving us huge advancements in brain power, experts told peers at the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee (pictured, stock)

Growing the Artificial Intelligence Industry in the UK, an independent review of artificial intelligence recommended information about people’s health and lifestyles should be opened up to allow major advances to be made in developing artificial intelligence (AI).

It calls for the Alan Turing Institute, named in honour of the wartime codebreaker, to become a national centre for AI and said the Government should expand its support for businesses in the field.

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