Autonomous drones may have been used to hunt down and attack human targets in combat for the first time, according to a United Nations Security Council report. Armed with AI and an explosive warhead, the killer drones were deployed during a military offensive that was launched in March of last yearread more
While it has been said that Peru’s famous Nazca Lines are meant to be seen only from someone traveling through the air, researchers searching for more of the massive earthworks in the region took that saying a step further, and using satellite imagery and AI discovered 143 previously-undiscovered geoglyphs acrossread more
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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