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"An artificially intelligent fighter pilot system has defeated two attacking jets in a combat simulation. The AI, known as Alpha, used four virtual jets to successfully defend a coastline against two attacking aircraft - and did not suffer any losses. Alpha, which was developed by a US team, also triumphed in simulation against a retired human fighter pilot."

"The first known death caused by a self-driving car was disclosed by Tesla Motors on Thursday evening, a development that is sure to cause consumers to second-guess the trust they put in the booming autonomous vehicle industry. "

"It seems highly likely that competition between the various companies developing these technologies will produce practical, self-driving trucks within the next five to 10 years. And once the technology is proven, the incentive to adopt it will be powerful: in the US alone, large trucks are involved in about 350,000 crashes a year, resulting in nearly 4,000 fatalities. Virtually all of these incidents can be traced to human error. The potential savings in lives, property damage and exposure to liability will eventually become irresistible. There's only one problem: truck driving is one of the most common occupations in the US. "

"The study found that when a person's gait-speed dropped by 5cm/second within a week, this was a sign that they were at increased risk of a fall - in fact, 86% had a fall within three weeks when such a drop in walking speed was observed. By contrast, the elderly residents who had no change in walking speed had a background probability of falling of 19.5%."

"Google's neural networks have achieved the dream of CSI viewers everywhere: the company has revealed a new AI system capable of "enhancing" an eight-pixel square image, increasing the resolution 16-fold and effectively restoring lost data. The neural network could be used to increase the resolution of blurred or pixelated faces, in a way previously thought impossible; a similar system was demonstrated for enhancing images of bedrooms, again creating a 32x32 pixel image from an 8x8 one."

"Participants used an app on their phones to record 30-second intervals of themselves reading a piece of text, describing a positive experience, then describing a negative experience. Doctors also took recordings from a control group of 25 patients who were either healthy or getting non-heart-related tests. The doctors found 13 different voice characteristics associated with coronary artery disease. Most notably, the biggest differences between heart patients and non-heart patients' voices occurred when they talked about a negative experience."

""No-limit Texas Hold'em is a game of incomplete information where the AI must infer a human player's intentions and then act in ways that incorporate both the direct odds of winning and bluffing behaviour to try to fool the other player." The designers said their computer didn't "bluff" the human players. But by learning from its mistakes and practising its moves at night between games, the AI was working out how to defeat its human opponents."

""The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people," said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at the Oxford Internet Institute. "Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years.""

"Scott is interested in conserving the stuff we have forgotten has value. Increasingly, our culture plays itself out on the internet, yet even now we have a tendency to view what we do on there as trivial. Or we make the mistake of assuming that digital means for ever."

"Security researcher Troy Hunt reports that the snuggly spies, from Spiral Toys, Security researcher Troy Hunt reports that the snuggly spies, from Spiral Toys, "represents the nexus" of the problem with internet-connected appliances and toys: children being recorded, data being leaked, and the technical possibility of surreptitious access to children through networked toys. "The best way to understand what these guys do is to simply watch the video [advertisement for the toy].""

"DeepCoder uses a technique called program synthesis: creating new programs by piecing together lines of code taken from existing software - just like a programmer might. Given a list of inputs and outputs for each code fragment, DeepCoder learned which pieces of code were needed to achieve the desired result overall. "It could allow non-coders to simply describe an idea for a program and let the system build it""

"If humans want to continue to add value to the economy, they must augment their capabilities through a "merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence". If we fail to do this, we'll risk becoming "house cats" to artificial intelligence."