The live stream of the showdowns was viewed by more than 55,000 people.

“This is, of course, an exciting moment for us,” said David Silver, a researcher at DeepMind. “For the first time, we saw an AI that was able to defeat a professional player.”

DeepMind created five versions of their ‘AlphaStar’ AI. Each AI was trained with historic game footage that StarCraft-developer Blizzard has been releasing on a monthly basis.

In order to further improve their abilities, the five AIs were pitted against each other in a league. The leading AI racked up experience that would equate to a human training for around 200 years.

Perhaps needless to say, AlphaStar wiped the floor with human players Grzegorz Komincz and Dario Wunsch.

You can watch AlphaStar taking on the human players below:

The only hope for humans so far is that AlphaStar was trained for a single map and using just the one alien race type of three available in the game. Removed from its comfort zone, it would not perform as well.

Video games have driven more rudimentary AI developments for decades. The advancement shown by AlphaStar could be used to create more complex ‘bots’ that can pose a challenge and help train even the best human players.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen DeepMind’s AI bots in action – but, in the past, they’ve had a tendency of immediately rushing its opponents with ‘workers’ in a behaviour that Blizzard called “amusing”.

deepgeniusai.com/">AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, , & .

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Logz.io is an intelligent log analytics platform that synthesises machine data, user behaviour, and community knowledge to provide timely actionable insights to operations. It uses the combined power of machine learning and open-source ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack.

Two new features are introduced in the platform to empower customers to attain the most value from their data: Application Insights and Data Optimizer. Application Insights enables faster incident detection and resolution of critical application issues. Data Optimizer empowers enterprises to reduce the cost of data retention by determining which logs have value and how long they should be stored.

Logz.io’s funding was led by OpenView with participation from investors 83North, Giza and Vintage Investment Partners. The company, whose customer base has more than more than tripled year on year to reach more than 400, will utilise the new funding to fuel new product innovations and expand its current headquarters in Boston, MA.

Arterys, an imaging analytics company fusing AI and cloud computing, had its funding round led by Temasek, along with Varian, Northwell Health Ventures, NewYork-Presbyterian, GE Ventures and several leading venture investors. The funding will be directed towards expanding its web-based artificial intelligence platform, launching new products in oncology and neurology, and to accelerate the commercialisation of its cardiac offering.

Fabien Beckers, founder and CEO of Arterys, said: “This financing includes pioneers in healthcare who recognise the game-changing value of a cloud AI platform to unlock the potential of radiology data to improve patient care. We are excited to grow our offerings and work with our clinical partners in building powerful, accessible tools for the medical imaging community to accelerate the transition to data driven medicine.”

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Brown’s reasoning for his remark is that humanity no longer needs God but instead will develop a new form of collective consciousness with the help of artificial intelligence which fulfills the role of religion.

Studies prove that religious belief is already in decline globally. Brown’s new book, Origin, was inspired by the question of “Will God survive science?” now that — for the first time in history — there are more agnostics and atheists than believers in many countries.

It’s an interesting question and one that’s been explored by more people than just Brown in recent years. Neil Gaiman’s epic fantasy novel ‘American Gods’ was recently turned into a TV series and questions whether humanity is moving away from worshiping traditional godly figures in favour of the ‘new gods’ of society, technology, and globalisation.

“Are we naive today to believe that the gods of the present will survive and be here in a hundred years?” Brown, 53, told a packed news conference.

Naturally, his views will be seen as controversial and he recognises they will not be welcomed by many clerics. However, in a world still full of religious conflict, he calls for greater harmony between religions and those who choose not to believe.

“Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all share a gospel, loosely, and it’s important that we all realise that,” he said. “Our religions are much more similar than they are different.”

While it’s perhaps easy to dismiss Brown as just a fantasy writer, he spent a lot of time speaking to futurists and experts while researching for his book. The protagonist, Harvard Professor Robert Langdon, was also the lead character in Brown’s popular novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’ which received its fair share of controversy for questioning the history of Christianity.

“We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,” he said, forecasting the emergence of “some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine.”

“Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us, will diminish and eventually disappear.”

Do you agree or disagree with Brown’s remarks?

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