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In the early days of life on Earth, biological organisms were exceedingly simple. They were microscopic unicellular creatures with little to no ability to coordinate. Yet billions of years of evolution through competition and natural selection led to the complex life forms we have today -- as well as complex human intelligence. Researchers at OpenAI, the San-Francisco-based for-profit AI research lab, are now testing a hypothesis: if you could mimic that kind of competition in a virtual world, would it also give rise to much more sophisticated artificial intelligence? From a report: The experiment builds on two existing ideas in the field: multi-agent learning, the idea of placing multiple algorithms in competition or coordination to provoke emergent behaviors, and reinforcement learning, the specific machine-learning technique that learns to achieve a goal through trial and error. In a new paper released today, OpenAI has now revealed its initial results. Through playing a simple game of hide and seek hundreds of millions of times, two opposing teams of AI agents developed complex hiding and seeking strategies that involved tool use and collaboration. The research also offers insight into OpenAI's dominant research strategy: to dramatically scale existing AI techniques to see what properties emerge.

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Facebook, which last month said it stopped using humans to review and transcribe users' voice messages, will resume that practice for some audio collected from its Portal video-calling device. From a report: Facebook "paused human review of audio" around August. Bloomberg reported at the time the company hired contractors to transcribe private voice messages sent via its Messenger app. In that case, users had not been alerted to the possibility that their communications might be subject to human review. It was also unclear at the time that some of the clips Facebook had been collecting were coming from Portal. Facebook confirmed Wednesday that it was indeed collecting audio from Portal users who make a request from the device using the command "Hey Portal." By default, those commands were recorded and stored on Facebook servers, and some of them were transcribed by contractors working with the company to improve the software algorithms used to understand the commands, according to Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's head of hardware. That practice was paused last month at the same time Messenger stopped using humans to transcribe messages.

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UK.gov policy slammed for not keeping pace with technology

Plans to introduce a legal right for everyone in the UK to have minimum broadband speeds of 10Mbps next year will be "obsolete soon after introduction", a Parliamentary report has found.…

Social afflictions solved by waving an 'inexhaustible chalice' in your face

Orthodox priests in the central Russian city of Tver have been practising an original method of ridding locals of alcohol abuse and fornication: grab some religious relics, jump in a bi-plane, circle overhead and pour holy water onto citizens from the skies while reciting prayers.…

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Physicists have set a new limit on the mass of nature's lightest particle of matter. The neutrino can weigh no more than 1.1 electron volts (eV) -- less than one-500,000th the mass of an electron -- say experimenters with the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Reported on September 13 at a meeting in Toyama, Japan, the new result halves the previous limit of 2 eV. Physicists have tried to measure the neutrino's mass for decades. However, the particle barely interacts with ordinary matter. So to deduce its mass, researchers study the radioactive "[Beta] decay" of tritium, in which a nucleus spits out an electron and a neutrino. By precisely measuring the maximum energy of the ejected electrons, physicists can infer the mass of the unobserved neutrinos. KATRIN (above) takes this classic approach to the ultimate limit, employing a 23-meter-long blimplike spectrometer to measure the electron from tritium with unprecedented precision. Cosmological measurements already suggest the neutrino cannot weigh more than about 0.1 eV, but that estimate is based on several assumptions. So KATRIN physicists argue that their better, directly measured limit on neutrino mass is likely to make cosmology models more reliable.

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New report after 12 forces across England and Wales trialled technology

MPs across parties have called for an immediate "stop" to live facial recognition surveillance by the police and in public places.…

It might even hand you the fire extinguisher

An autonomous dog-like robot designed to scamper down tunnels on search-and-rescue missions was put to the test in the most recent bout of US military boffins' DARPA Subterranean Challenge.…

Savage

SAP's German customers are using a meeting in Nuremberg to complain the company should be doing more to make its products usable.…

Preview of private endpoints accessible both in the cloud and on premises

Microsoft has pulled the sheets off Azure Private Link as a way to create a private endpoint for a shared service.…

Pair of bug reports show how VM escapes put servers at risk

A pair of newly disclosed security flaws could allow malicious virtual machine guests to break out of their hypervisor's walled gardens and execute malicious code on the host box.…

New submitter mikaere writes: The New Zealand Herald reports that Amazon will base their upcoming Lord of the Rings TV series in West Auckland (home to fantasy series such as Hercules, Xena: Warrior Princess,Legend of the Seeker and The Chronicles of Shannara. The article mentions that Sir Peter Jackson may have some involvement, and it is likely that iconic locales, such as Queenstown, could be used for location shoots as they were in the original screen trilogy. As for how much the Amazon LOTR production would cost, a local industry insider suggested it could have a $3 billion price tag. Actual filming for the TV show is not expected to begin until 2020.

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Brit airport to extend facial recog after easyJet trial

Gatwick Airport will extend its use of facial recognition to match passengers to their passports at departure gates before they board planes.…

The past present and future of a confusing platform

Interview The development experience may be easy, but the open-source Cloud Foundry (CF) platform is confusing as hell for newcomers. Chip Childers, CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation since it was formed in January 2015, spoke to The Reg about its past, present and future, at the recent Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague.…

Wrong: Biz committee bemoans lack of automation strategy

The UK government needs to come up with an actual strategy to help businesses and workers take advantage of automation and robotics.…

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Amid the sand dunes of the western Sahara, workers are putting the finishing touches on one of the world's largest solar installations. There, as many as 7.2 million photovoltaic panels will make up Benban Solar Park -- a renewable energy project so massive, it will be visible from space. The 1.8-gigawatt installation is the first utility-scale PV plant in Egypt, a nation blessed with some of the best solar resources on the planet. The ambitious project is part of Egypt's efforts to increase its generation capacity and incorporate more renewable sources into the mix. Once operational, Benban Solar Park will avoid two million tons of CO2 emissions per year [PDF] compared with what's belched into the air by a thermal power station generating the same amount of electricity. That difference is roughly equivalent to half the annual emissions produced by one coal-fired power plant. To create the park, Egypt's government selected a remote desert site with high solar radiation and divided it into 41 plots of varying sizes. It assigned those plots to roughly 30 developers that expressed interest in the project, and the government promised to pay a competitive price (through financial incentives called feed-in tariffs [PDF]) for all power produced at Benban for 25 years.

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Tired: SQLi. Expired: Format string exploits. Hired: Anyone who can port code from C/C++

On Tuesday, the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) team from MITRE, a non-profit focused on information security for government, industry and academia, published its list of the CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors.…

If we could stop teaching AI insults, that would be great

Netizens are merrily slinging selfies and other photos at an online neural network to classify them... and the results aren’t pretty.…

His persuasive argument? You’re wrong – we know better about this money stuff

The Facebook exec in charge of its Libra cryptocurrency effort has sought to assure European governments that their fears are unfounded… by telling them they’re wrong and Facebook knows better.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Greenhouse gases thrust into the atmosphere mainly by burning fossil fuels are warming Earth's surface more quickly than previously understood, according to new climate models set to replace those used in current UN projections, scientists said Tuesday. By 2100, average temperatures could rise 7.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels if carbon emissions continue unabated, separate models from two leading research centers in France showed. That is up to two degrees higher than the equivalent scenario in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change's (IPCC) 2014 benchmark 5th Assessment Report. The new calculations also suggest that the Paris Agreement goals of capping global warming at "well below" two degrees, and 1.5C if possible, will be challenging at best, the scientists said. "With our two models, we see that the scenario known as SSP1 2.6 -- which normally allows us to stay under 2C -- doesn't quite get us there," Olivier Boucher, head of the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace Climate Modeling Center in Paris, told AFP. A new generation of 30-odd climate models known collectively as CMIP6 -- including the two unveiled Tuesday -- will underpin the IPCC's next major report in 2021.

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Let's a take a quick tour under the hood – and spell out why your biz needs this

Comment Anyone who’s ever watched the original Star Trek series will probably remember Spock and Kirk playing three-dimensional chess – a great chance for the Enterprise’s science officer to show off his prowess with logic as he contemplated a range of complex moves.…