We live in an exciting era where new technologies are allowing us to amass huge quantities of data about cancer. And vast databases containing the genetic profiles of tumours and other information have…
You might think social networks couldn’t possibly gather more information on you than they already do. That in a world where your every move is tagged, flagged and logged, there is nothing more that could…
Robots represent the cutting edge in science. For decades we have been promised a bright future in which these human-like machines will become so advanced that we won’t be able to tell the difference between…
When the IBM computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 it seemed to many we had crossed a threshold. By beating us at our (arguably) most complex intellectual task, man had…
Fear of machines becoming smarter than humans is a standard part of popular culture. In films like iRobot and Terminator, humans are usurped. Throughout history we can trace stories about humankind overreaching…
When you first stare down that tough opponent in a videogame (think Big Daddies in Bioshock or Striders in Half-Life 2), it can seem impossible to beat the computer-controlled character you’re facing…
We already know robots manufacture cars, work in factories, even vacuum our homes - but could they form a world-beating soccer team? The question seems like ripe pickings for a movie mogul, given Hollywood’s…
For much of his adult life, painter and scholar Harold Cohen has been working in collaboration with a computer to make visual art. Cohen has worked almost continuously on this creative artificial intelligence…
We know how to deal with suspicious packages – as carefully as possible! These days, we let robots take the risk. But what if the robots are the risk? Some commentators argue we should be treating AI (artificial…
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.” William Gibson, Count…
In the late 1700s, French scientist Antoine Lavoisier proved that the mechanism behind burning is oxidation. Lavoisier’s discovery killed off an eternity of dogma involving a non-existent substance called…
As mentioned already on this site and others, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of famed British mathematician Alan Turing. The outline of his remarkable life and sad ending has by now…
Predicting the future is a risky business. If it wasn’t, we’d all be very wealthy by now. The Danish physicist Neils Bohr famously opined: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. Despite…
You may have read the British Government is being petitioned to grant a posthumous pardon to one of the world’s greatest mathematicians and most successful codebreakers, Alan Turing. You may also have…
Welcome to the second instalment of If I had a blank cheque … a series in which leading researchers reveal what they could (and would) do in their discipline if money were no object. Today we hear from…
Can an ant’s strategy for moving around be useful for building robots with autonomous navigation? Working with experts in the field of artificial intelligence, we have just begun to explore this possibility…
In February this year, game shows got that little bit harder. And at the same time, artificial intelligence took another step towards the ultimate goal of creating and perhaps exceeding human-level intelligence…