AI

If you, like us, used to spend hours sitting in front of the TV playing Tetris on your Nintendo Entertainment System, you're going to love T-Crisis 3 100% A.I. It's not a clone of the original, but that's OK; we daresay it's even better.

The program's interface is easy to navigate, but we had to do some experimenting to figure out all the game's features; there's not much in the way of instructions or descriptions. T-Crisis supports up to three players, and when you don't have friends playing along, the computer … Read more

"I must say that your face sounds familiar."

It may not be the warmest response to a pickup line, but in robot terms it's almost a home run. Daniel123 looks like he scored a date with Jane234.

Earlier this month, we saw how a charming little open-source robot called Qbo recognized itself in a mirror.

After a bit of preening, this particular Qbo (aka Daniel123) was ready for action. In the latest video from Francisco Paz and TheCorpora, who are developing Qbo as an artificial intelligence project, Daniel meets a female Qbo named Jane234 and seems to take a shine to her.

"You're very good looking," Daniel tells Jane. … Read more

While software may not be the glitziest of categories on display at CES, there's still plenty to be excited about as we prep for the 2012 event. From artificial intelligence to home integration, apps are definitely on the rise. Also, expect the cloud and health care to emerge as topics yet again.

Forecast: Cloudy Though this was on many prediction lists last year, we expect cloud computing to really hit its stride beginning with announcements at 2012's Consumer Electronics Show. Now that Apple's iCloud and other services have found creative (and successful) ways to store data in … Read more

The best thing I saw at CES in 2010 was the Parrot AR Drone, an iPhone-controlled quadcopter. It was a really fun toy, but an expensive one, and not that reliable either, as I learned when my demo unit dropped out of the sky. But this platform, the quadcopter, can be a serious player in solving real-world problems. Aeryon, which I covered in 2009, played an important part in the Libyan rebellion: one of its flying bots helped the rebels see over their heads to where their opposition was gathering.

And at the graduation ceremony of the Singularity University this week, I was introduced to another real-world, save-the-world company that's applying quadcopter technology: Matternet.

This particular class of S.U. was focused on solving problems for "the next billion people," those without access to modern technology. Matternet tackled the problem of getting drugs and diagnostic or test materials to people in rural areas in developing countries that don't have access to passable roads during rainy seasons.

The company proposed building a network of robotic drones to deliver medication quickly and very cost-effectively--even less than a guy on a dirt bike costs.

… Read more

Modern captchas are effective at keeping bots and algorithms from accessing Web sites made for humans. They also generate collateral damage and keep up to 25 percent of humans out, too, according to Ron Moravek, COO of NuCaptcha. He says he has a better, more flexible technology for filtering humans from bots.

NuCaptcha is a replacement technology for the free, Google-owned ReCaptcha service. There are two major differences between NuCaptcha and ReCaptcha. First, NuCaptcha displays moving text against a moving image. While this makes it harder for computers to discern text from background, it makes it much easier for humans. … Read more

For the last 30 years, Pac-Man's estranged wife, Ms. Pac-Man, has been consuming countless coins and hours from gamers at arcades across North America.

Philipp Rohlfshagen, David Robles, and Simon Lucas, all of the University of Essex, recently launched a competition called Ms. Pac-Man vs. Ghost Team for those wanting to rewrite the flow of the classic chomper. The contest, held last week in New Orleans at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2011, was an open call for savvy Java programmers to create artificial intelligence routines that either control where Ms. Pac-Man or the four ghosts should go during gameplay. If you can't beat them, hack them.

Programming a successful strategy for a game like Ms. Pac-Man in real time is very complicated (click here for the software). A more competitive version of Ms. Pac-Man was used in the exhibition; fruits were omitted and the speed of Ms Pac-Man and the ghosts were identical. Entrants to the competition weren't allowed to use screen captures to navigate. They were required to directly interface with the game engine instead.… Read more

On this special edition of Reporters' Roundtable, CNET Chief Political Correspondent Declan McCullagh hosts a panel discussion on Journalism in the age of WikiLeaks. Sponsored by the The Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California, this discussion covers how WikiLeaks is forcing editors and reporters to rethink traditional journalistic practices.

For example, The New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel were given a mere three weeks to decide how to handle more than 90,000 confidential documents on Afghanistan. Join us as we discuss the challenges journalists face given such information and as we consider the question of the role of professional news organizations when anyone can publish the kind of information that previously was the purview only of established news outlets.

We have a great panel of six journalists in this discussion, including reporters and editors from the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, and Fast Company.

Subscribe: iTunes (MP3)iTunes (320x180)iTunes (640x360)Podcast RSS (MP3)Podcast RSS (320x180)Podcast RSS (640x360) … Read more

Big news in AI this week: IBM's Watson project defeated "Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-night prime-time demo match. What does that win mean for computing, and more importantly, for humanity? That's the topic for this week's Reporters' Roundtable, and to discuss it we have two great guests, both with current books on the topics of computer vs. human competition.

First up is Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. Baker reported on the development of Watson from inside IBM headquarters to write this book. He was BusinessWeek's senior technology writer before that.

And branching out a bit from the Watson news, we also have Brian Christian with us. He's the author of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, which will be out on March 1. He's also author of the recent Atlantic cover story Mind vs. Machine, which is a great primer for this topic. Both of these works tell the story of Brian's participation in the annual Loebner Prize, in which humans face off with computers in a Turing test competition to convince judges that they are human. Brian, it should be noted, was voted most human.

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Some of our discussion points… Read more

On Friday, the Reporters' Roundtable podcast tackles a simple question: what is unique about the human mind? As I write this, IBM's Watson project is doing a respectable job on the game show "Jeopardy." With one game out of three played, the machine is tied against human champion Brad Rutter. Does that mean Watson is as smart as Rutter?

At "Jeopardy," maybe. Or maybe Watson is just a cleverly programmed, pattern-matching supercomputer with an unfair … Read more