Why Artificial Intelligence Researchers Love 'Super Mario Bros.'

Super Mario Bros. is without question one of the finest video games of all time. Its game mechanics, physics, and challenges all form a cohesive experience that has kept gamers smashing goombas for decades. It’s damn near perfect. But in recent years, the plump plumber has found a new purpose beyond pure entertainment; for some, it is also a test bed for artificial intelligence research.
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Can Consciousness be Non-Biological?

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Oliver Sacks on the Kind of Hallucination He Would Liked to Have Had

The late neuroscientist spoke to Motherboard in 2012. By Alex Pasternack.
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Tangled Up in Entanglement

Researchers affirmed once again that quantum mechanics, as strange as it may seem, works in every way we can test it. By Lawrence M. Krauss.
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A 6,000-year-old 'eco-home' found near Stonehenge

The discovery has been dubbed an “eco” house and is like nothing archaeologists have unearthed from Stonehenge before. Our green ancestors used the giant base – around 9 metres – of a large tree which had fallen to make into the wall of their house.
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The Archive of Eating

One 84-year-old librarian has spent more than half her life building a comprehensive database of cookbooks throughout history. Bee Wilson on the achievement of food historian Barbara Ketcham Wheaton.
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Google finally smarter than humans

When Google parent company Alphabet reported eye-popping earnings last week, its executives couldn't stop talking up the company's investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. For any other company that would be a wonky distraction from its core business. At Google, the two are intertwined. Artificial intelligence sits at the extreme end of machine learning, which sees people create software that can learn about the world.
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