Science News: Event Horizon Telescope & a big step towards true AI

The cool idea I introduced a few blog posts ago, a virtual telescope (from Hawaii to Antartica to Spain) with a combined diameter of the Earth (10,000K!) built to observe the Event Horizon of Black Holes has been turned on and taken it's first series of pictures.  The story below provides details, alas the data goes to supercomputers and it will take months to create a "picture" from the data.

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-astronomers-piece-image-black-hole.html

Just saw this, new TED Talk about the EVT
https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hole_look_like

In other news, a great piece (from MIT's Technology Review zine) on a more mysterious but almost surely more powerful form of AI which has begun to come to fruition!  The article isn't short but well worth the read, touches on many tangentially interesting topics as well.  This form of AI is more biological in nature, it's an extreme in a way, you give the program the power to observe and experience then it develops it's own algorithms (genetic algorithm's I presume) to try and achieve a task.  NVIDIA used this approach with an autonomous car and got some promising but somewhat scary results, the car certainly was driving but by the very nature of the approach, a black box is essentially created that neither the programmers or engineers can tell you much about...it's akin to the AI created a brain and now we need to study it to figure out how it works!

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

I highly recommend this story to even my readers who aren't super interested in science, AI has become almost a regular dinner table topic of conversation these days.  A far cry from the small corner of science it held back when I began to follow it in High School (long time ago!).  It will affect more and more of your life as it becomes intertwined in all aspects of society, so probably not a bad topic to at least casually keep up on!