A 6ft robot is now able to walk and run over rocky terrain and balance itself just like a human.

Google’s Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot has been upgraded so it is able to balance itself as it travels over stones and rocks.

In a video the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition explains: “The Atlas Humanoid walking over small and partial footholds such as small stepping stones or line contacts.

OpenAI hopes that by making artificial intelligence more useful, it’ll gain wider use and acceptance.

Google DeepMind’s new simulated world could lead to advances in robotics, and help us better understand how humans learn.

MIT researchers and their colleagues have developed a new computational model of the human brain’s face-recognition mechanism that seems to capture aspects of human neurology that previous models have missed.

The researchers designed a machine-learning system that implemented their model, and they trained it to recognize particular faces by feeding it a battery of sample images. They found that the trained system included an intermediate processing step that represented a face’s degree of rotation — say, 45 degrees from center — but not the direction — left or right.

This property wasn’t built into the system; it emerged spontaneously from the training process. But it duplicates an experimentally observed feature of the primate face-processing mechanism. The researchers consider this an indication that their system and the brain are doing something similar.

Deep learning is changing how Google’s search engine works. But its new-found efficiency takes a lot of painstaking human work behind the scenes.