Last week, we reported on robots being taught how to think, learn and talk. Now, a robot from a whole new different league is coming. The said robot called Zeno is turning heads at CeBIT 2008 with its ability to reason independently. Learn more about Robot Zeno after the jump.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future of robotics: The University of Plymouth is sending out word that its staff will be working with a humanoid baby known as iCub.

Their objective is to make this robot think, learn, and talk in four years. As much as it is eerie, the prospect of this becoming a reality is also as exciting. Know the full details after the jump!

Stuff Magazine is currently running a rumor stating that the much-loved Artificial Intelligence roBOt or AIBO is being resurrected by Sony and is making it compatible with the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable.

t was also mentioned that the domesticated robot dog will interact in the virtual environment much like it used to do in the real world. More details and the magazine scan after the jump!

In the real world, there are so many uncertainties that we go on with our days, living and making decisions with only partial information. It would seem that computers aren't ready for the real world yet, because they can only go so far without knowing all the outcomes.

According to Jonathan Schaeffer, head of the University of Alberta's Computer Science Department and a research chair in the field of Artificial Intelligence, that is the problem facing AI development today. Chess has already been used as an important ground for researching AI, but the step up from chess - poker - isn't coming easy.

Why poker?

Well, whereas chess allows the artificial intelligence and its opponent to know everything there is to know about the situation because the game is wholly visible, poker forces players to deal with partial information.

Currently, Artificial Intelligence programmers are finding it difficult to move to poker games as a testing ground for AI because they haven't figured out a way to write programs that can make decisions from incomplete information.  In the real world, Schaeffer says, "knowing everything is so rare. Everything we do all day long is all about partial information. So poker’s much more representative of what the real world’s like, and in that sense it becomes a much harder problem."

Schaeffer is also known as one of the designers of Hyperborean, a poker-playing AI that recently won the top prize against other poker-playing AI programs. While being the best is a step up, however, poker AI is one thing and an unpredictable player is another. All in all, the leap from knowledge to guesswork is a big one, and one that won't easily be done.

When they've bridged this gap between the known and the unknown for AI, however, it will be interesting to see if the AI still bases its playing on logic, or on adopting a particular style. Hopefully, that sort of advance in AI research will come sooner than expected.

Besides, wouldn't it be interesting to see an AI actually bluff?

    

A Japanese company called Lofty Co. has created a pillow that will track the quality of your sleep. This pillow not only tells you if you had a rough night (determined by the amount of head movement on the pillow) but the pillow also will compare that data to your previous nights of rest, which it charts for you on an LCD display embedded on the pillow (that's the most comfortable part).  The pillow will also tell you if you should power nap during the day.

In 2004 the Japanese Lofty Co. pillow company teamed up with Japanese toy giant Tomy Co. and created a doll called Yumiel. Yumiel is a doll that also monitors your sleep, it has 6 sensors and can say over 1,200 sentences.  Yumiel will pester their owners to go to sleep if they are up late, tell them to wake up if they sleep late, and even tell you weather or not you those thoughts of murdering everyone in your workplace are just because you "got up on the wrong side of the bed" that morning.

Perhaps next, Japan will create a towel that senses the user's dryness and fluffs itself accordingly.  Of course, the towel will have it's own artificial intelligence, so it can play video games with you and get high all the time.