We asked the experts when they estimated AI would reach each of four milestones:

* passing the Turing test by carrying on a conversation well enough to pass as a human * solving problems as well as a third grade elementary school student * performing Nobel-quality scientific work * going beyond the human level to superhuman intelligence

We also asked how the timing of achieving these milestones would be affected by massive funding of $100 billion/year going into AGI R&D.

We also probed opinions on what the really intelligent AIs will look like — will they have physical bodies or will they just live in the computer and communicate with voice or text? And how can we get from here to there?

Since September 27, 2007, I have been documenting the graffiti left in public study areas in the Joseph Regenstein Library ("the Reg"): the study nooks tucked into the stacks, the whiteboards in the all-night study space, and the study carrels in the reading rooms. I have transcribed over 620 “pieces” of graffiti—many of which contain more than one single contribution—and over 410 of them are datable to within a week of their creation. The following is an analysis of the data to date; you can access the entire data set at my website, Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur.

The Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results (JSUR) is an open-access forum for researchers seeking to further scientific discovery by sharing surprising or unexpected results. These results should provide guidance toward the verification (or negation) of extant hypotheses. JSUR has two branches, one focusing on computational sciences and the other on the life sciences. JSUR submissions include, but are not limited to, short communications of recent research results, full-length papers, review articles or opinion pieces.

[W]e describe selected studies of experimental evolution with robots to illustrate how the process of natural selection can lead to the evolution of complex traits such as adaptive behaviours. Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism. In all cases this occurred via selection in robots controlled by a simple neural network, which mutated randomly.

JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.

At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species.

[Hitoshi Murayama] proposes that the Universe is, in fact, a quantum fluid, somewhat like a superconductor. How does this work? The analogy with superconductivity is apt because superconductors reject magnetic fields. That is, the charges in a superconductor arrange themselves such that the field lines of a magnetic field get bent around the super-current. Now, imagine sitting in the superconductor, trying to make a magnetic field.

What you would see is that the field was incredibly short-ranged because of the way the field would interact with the surrounding charges. Therein lies the idea. Imagine that the Universe is a quantum fluid that interacts very strongly with the strong force and weak forces, but ignores gravity and electromagnetism.

Quantum computers are fundamentally different from classical computers because the physics of quantum information is also the physics of possibility. Classical computer memories are constrained to exist at any given time as a simple list of zeros and ones. In contrast, in a single quantum memory many such combinations—even all possible lists of zeros and ones—can all exist simultaneously. During a quantum algorithm, this symphony of possibilities split and merge, eventually coalescing around a single solution. The complexity of these large quantum states made of multiple possibilities make a complete description of quantum search or factoring a daunting task.

Andrew Carlson along with Prof. Tom Mitchell and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an artificial intelligence language-learning program that never ends.

It simply continues to run and learn more of the English language every day.

The idea is that the Web contains so much information to be extracted, and has so much new information added each day, that an AI program can continuously mine it without its knowledge ever reaching a plateau.

After long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves such as those used in cell phones, mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's performed as well on memory and thinking skill tests as healthy mice, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

Did our Neolithic ancestors turn to agriculture so that they could be sure of a tipple? US Archaeologist Patrick McGovern thinks so. The expert on identifying traces of alcohol in prehistoric sites reckons the thirst for a brew was enough of an incentive to start growing crops.