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Strategy games such as chess have long been considered important ways to measure artificial intelligence. But A.I. researchers at Carnegie Mellon University chose a different, and in some ways, more challenging game: poker. Susan Koeppen of CBS Pittsburgh station KDKA reports on what happens when the chips are down. Doug Polk, 26, is considered the best heads up, or one on one, no limit Texas hold 'em player in the world. He's defeated countless opponents and won millions of dollars. Polk bet his reputation that he could beat Claudico, Carnegie Mellon's artificial intelligence super computer.

MIT scientists have developed a system called Enterprise that provides cognitive abilities to autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The system provides high-level decision making abilities to robots. ... One part of the Enterprise system is called "captain," which makes high-level decisions related to the entire mission. Another part of the system works like a navigator that plans out a route for achieving the mission goals. The Enterprise system also has a component that works like an engineer or a doctor, which repairs and diagnoses problems autonomously. Williams has also worked with NASA's Ames Research Center. The space agency has similar systems...

Humans won in the competition because of Douglas Polk and Bjorn Li, who are the world's top players. Polk said that they managed to win and beat the computers and it's a victory of humans. Polk said, "We really managed to find some weaknesses in some of the ways it liked to play its hands, and we exploited some of those to build our lead". The lion's share of the $100,000 prize money was won by individual winner Bjorn Li of Hong Kong.

Original full title/subtitle:Microsoft's secret weapon in browser wars: Mozilla's supercharged Asm.js Native-speed JavaScript available now in Windows 10's Edge browser Microsoft has included a surprise feature in its new Edge web browser for Windows 10, in the form of support for the ultra-optimizable Asm.js JavaScript dialect. First developed by Mozilla and championed by the nonprofit's former CTO Brendon Eich, Asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript that aims to be the "assembly language of the web." By eliminating many of the vagaries of the JavaScript language syntax, Asm.js forces client-side web code into a form that is easy for Just-In-Time...

The Internet woke up to a shock this morning. Microsoft MSFT +2.18% has used its Ignite 2015 conference to declare Windows 10 will be “the last version of Windows” . The reaction has been predictably alarmist, but what exactly does it mean and is this really the end for Windows as we know it? First some context. The statement came from Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon, a self proclaimed ‘developer evangelist’ who stated: “Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10.” If this sounds strange, Microsoft...

Last November, Microsoft said that it would bring some of the core features of its .NET platform — which has traditionally been Windows-only — to Linux and Mac. Today, at its Build developer conference, the company announced its first full preview of the .NET Core runtime for Linux and Mac OS X.In addition, Microsoft is making the release candidate of the full .NET framework for Windows available to developers today [April 29, 2015]. The highlight here, though, is obviously the release of .NET Core for platforms other than Windows. As Microsoft VP of its developer division S. “Soma” Somasegar told...

MacKeeper, a utility and security program for Apple computers, celebrated its fifth birthday in April. But its gift to U.S. consumers who bought the application may be a slice of a $2 million class-action settlement. Released in 2010, MacKeeper has been dogged by accusations that it exaggerates security threats in order to convince customers to buy. Its aggressive marketing has splashed MacKeeper pop-up ads all over the web. The program was originally created by a company called ZeoBIT in Kiev, Ukraine. The country—full of young, smart programmers—has long been a hub for lower-cost software development and outsourcing.

A computer virus that tries to avoid detection by making the machine it infects unusable has been found. If Rombertik's evasion techniques are triggered, it deletes key files on a computer, making it constantly restart. Analysts said Rombertik was "unique" among malware samples for resisting capture so aggressively. On Windows machines where it goes unnoticed, the malware steals login data and other confidential information. Endless loop Rombertik typically infected a vulnerable machine after a booby-trapped attachment on a phishing message had been opened, security researchers Ben Baker and Alex Chiu, from Cisco, said in a blogpost. Some of the messages...

You know one thing that’s great about the Apple Watch? People often don’t realize it’s a smartwatch. I discovered this while visiting the Normandy American Cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France when I asked the guard at the security checkpoint if he minded if I kept my Apple Watch on while walking through the metal detector. He didn’t seem to notice this wasn’t a typical watch, one that mostly shows you a black display instead of the actual time, and he let me pass through without putting the device into the plastic tray. But the Apple Watch, of...

You won't have to worry about dodgy toolbars, rogue ActiveX controls, or buggy plugins when you use Microsoft Edge (née Project Spartan), Redmond's new web browser for Windows 10. But you can also forget about extending the browser in any way, at least at first. Microsoft gave a sneak peek at its new, HTML/JavaScript-based extensibility engine for Edge at its Build developer conference in San Francisco last week. But on Wednesday we learned that this engine won't be available when the first general-availability build of Edge ships with the Windows 10 launch. "We will enable this new model after our...

M icrosoft unveiled Windows 10, its forthcoming operating system for the desktop, mobile, Xbox, and IoT late last year. The Windows 10 moniker was interesting, as ideally, Microsoft was expected to call the successor to Windows 8 (and 8.1) as Windows 9. The Redmond-based company explained why it didn’t go with ‘Windows 9’: it would have created conflict with older versions of Windows. Alright, so what will the next version of Windows be called? Windows 10, apparently. At Ignite conference earlier this week, Jerry Nixon, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist, said that Windows 10 “is the last version of Windows (so...

As sales of tablets and phones continue to outstrip demand for PCs, the technology industry is preparing for a shift in how people use computers. In this transition, phones and tablets are expected to begin to be used as desktop PCs, a change that will force a fundamental redesign of software. Instead of operating systems and applications having a single interface, apps will alter their look and controls to reflect how they are being used. For example, a UI that favours large, easily-tappable buttons on a touchscreen tablet might switch to tightly-packed icons when the tablet is used with a...

The Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo has been accused of running a "massive security risk" after researchers found flaws in its software. Three vulnerabilities could be exploited to install malware on users' systems or to hand attackers a measure of control over them, it was reported. Lenovo acknowledged the findings and urged users to download a patch to resolve the issues. The news follows revelations about pre-installed adware on Lenovo systems.

We rate 11 models from eight manufacturers, and Apple's sapphire screen and easy pairing give its models the edge We’ve been spot-testing smartwatches for a while now, but the with the arrival of the Apple Watch, the category has catapulted into mainstream status. (Even analysts who are down on the Watch’s prospects have Apple selling 30 million of these devices next year.) But Apple isn’t the only game in town. Manufacturers such as Samsung, Pebble, and Martian have been selling high-tech wristwear for years, and some of the watches from these companies are in their second and third generations. For...

About the security content of Safari 8.0.6, Safari 7.1.6, and Safari 6.2.6 This document describes the security content of Safari 8.0.6, Safari 7.1.6, and Safari 6.2.6. For the protection of our customers, Apple does not disclose, discuss, or confirm security issues until a full investigation has occurred and any necessary patches or releases are available. To learn more about Apple Product Security, see the Apple Product Security website.For information about the Apple Product Security PGP Key, see How to use the Apple Product Security PGP Key.Where possible, CVE IDs are used to reference the vulnerabilities for further information.To learn about other Security Updates, see Apple...

(This is about using Windows 10 on tiny embedded hardware for Internet-connected devices.) Windows 10 IoT Insider Preview was released yesterday (Apr 29) for various low cost hardware types - Raspberry Pi 2, MinnowBoard MAX, Intel Galileo and Arduino. It's available from here https://ms-iot.github.io/content/GetStarted.htm In this blog post I'll be getting the IoT release up and running on one of those devices, the Raspberry Pi 2. (Article goes into detailed steps of how to load Windows 10 onto a Raspberry Pi 2.)

To meet its goal of putting Windows 10 on a billion devices within three years, Microsoft will have to turn every personal computer now running Windows 7 onto the new OS, then find even more to migrate, calculations from recent statistics show. Microsoft staked out the ambitious plan last week at its Build developers conference. "Our goal is that within two to three years of Windows 10's release there will be one billion devices running Windows 10," said Terry Myerson, the chief of the firm's operating system group. One billion. A big, big number. For an idea how big, Computerworld...

IBM's supercomputer Watson will be used to make decisions about cancer care in 14 hospitals in the US and Canada, it has been announced. Using computers to trawl through vast amounts of medical data speeds up the diagnosis process. (excerpt) It also recently teamed up with IBM to allow the software that helps gather health data from iPhones to be used by Watson.

Such glitches emerge with surprising frequency. It’s suspected that the reason why Nasa lost contact with the Deep Impact space probe in 2013 was an integer limit being reached. And just last week it was reported that Boeing 787 aircraft may suffer from a similar issue. The control unit managing the delivery of power to the plane’s engines will automatically enter a failsafe mode – and shut down the engines – if it has been left on for over 248 days. Hypothetically, the engines could suddenly halt even in mid-flight. The Federal Aviation Administration’s directive on the matter states that...

Windows PowerShell Blog "Automating the world one-liner at a time…" With the release of Windows Management Framework 5.0 April Preview, we are excited to announce that PowerShell ScriptAnalyzer development has moved to GitHub for greater collaboration & community involvement. https://github.com/PowerShell/PSScriptAnalyzer Also, we have published v1.0 of ScriptAnalyzer to PSGallery. https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/PSScriptAnalyzer/ Here are the significant changes in this release: Features: "Recursive" switch to analyze a folderpath in Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer Three levels of Severity - Error/Warning/Informational Robust Engine that does emits non-terminating errors (Ex: for failed ast parse) and continues rule application when running on multiple scripts Add wild card supports for rules...