A team of scientists recently learned that "reinforcement learning" can be used to play a very complex war game.
At a glance, board games may seem to have no connection to artificial intelligence (AI). However, board games are quite useful when studying AI. When an AI is advanced enough to beat the best player in the world at a game like Chess or Go, it’s a huge scientific achievement. One strategy for writing an AI is called…
On a clear night you might easily see Jupiter, Mars or other planets from our solar system. This is how astronomers from thousands of years ago discovered the first planets. We cannot directly observe planets that are farther out in our solar system, as are Neptune and Uranus, so, of course, we cannot see planets that…
Creativity is no small task. We do our best to cultivate and cherish the imagination of young children, and struggle to maintain those senses as we get older. But what exactly is creativity? Can its rules be written down? Is there an algorithm for it? Can we teach a computer to be creative? As the maturing field of…
When studying the origin of life on Earth, scientists must rely on past data, physical laws, and models instead of direct observations. After all, we can’t know for sure what the world was like 4 billion years ago, when the first microscopic life was formed from a mixture of non-living molecules. But knowing about…