We can meet the hardware requirements for "strong" AI -- machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence -- by 2020, says Ray Kurzweil.

Autonomous agents are still in the labs but could eventually play a critical role in areas ranging from setting market prices to creating more resilient networks.

Profile of a company that has invented an artificial intelligence program that has been used to compose music, to coin words, to invent a new type of toothbrush and to detect patterns in seemingly random series of events.

A new DARPA program is research new intelligence technology to make it possible for humans and computers to "think together" in real time to "anticipate and preempt terrorist threats," according to official program documents.

The U.S. military has grand plans for the use of unmanned ground robots in future wars but significant advances need to be made in perception sensors?for the vehicles to be able to function in complex terrain and weather?and autonomous navigation.

The author looks at the growing use of predictive intelligence systems for everything from figuring out what people are going to buy next to detecting the next terrorist attack. He predicts that "defining the limits of how predictive intelligence can be used, by government and the private sector, is going to be the major technology debate of the coming year."

Researchers are developing puzzles that are extremely difficult for current machines or software programs to solve but easy for humans to crack as a way of distinguishing between humans and software programs.

Kwabena Boahen, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, is trying to achieve artificial intelligence by reverse engineering the human brain and modelling computer chips on the results.

A new breed of self-aware robots have had a big impact in space and here on Earth. Each possesses a detailed picture of its own inner workings?encoded in software-based models?that gives it the ability to respond in novel ways to events its programmers might not have anticipated. Because many of these inward-focused, self-reconfiguring machines don?t move, some computer scientists call them immobile robots, or ?immobots.?

The first supercomputers to approach and even surpass the processing power of the human brain are to be built by IBM, under a contract announced by the US Government.