Human player Brad Rutter and the supercomputer named Watson ended an initial round tied at $5,000. The other challenger, human Ken Jennings, was far behind with $2,000.

Rutter (the show's all-time money-winner with $3.25 million) and Jennings (who has the longest winning streak at 74 games) are the most successful players in "Jeopardy!" history. Watson, named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is powered by 10 racks of computer servers running the Linux operating system.

"You are about to witness what may prove to be an historic competition," host Alex Trebek told viewers at the top of the answer-and-question quiz show.

No question, Watson proved to be an amazing competitor -- maybe even a little creepy in the speed and accuracy it displayed.

With categories including Beatles People, Olympic Oddities and Name the Decade, the round got started with Rutter choosing the first answer, Alternate Meanings for $200: "4-letter word for a vantage point or a belief."

"What is a view?" was Rutter's correct response.

But Watson took charge with its question to Alternate Meanings for $400: "4-letter word for the iron fitting on the hoof of a horse or a card-dealing box in a casino."

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The proof required analyzing 500 billion billion checkers positions -- 5 x 10²⁰ -- a computational process that began in 1989 and has been running on hundreds of processors almost continuously since. Chinook now knows everything about checkers, the perfect response to any move, and the best that any human can do is drive Chinook to a draw. You can never win.

Checkers grandmasters have long suspected that perfect play would result in a draw, but until now, there has been no definitive proof. The first checkers-playing computer was created in 1963 by the artificial intelligence pioneer Arthur Samuel; the computer managed to win a single game against a human.

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But Pritchard. Pritchard is everything I want. And I'm not going to apologize about the way I met him. Especially not to my friends still slugging it out on LovePlanet.com. I did LovePlanet. Seventy-four dates with sixty-two men. You know what I learned? People lie. Sylvester was fifty-five, not thirty-five. Jacob was an unemployed bartender with halitosis, not a financial planner with a beach house. I admit I lied about my weight. All women lie about their weight.

But I can laugh at all of this now because I am off the roster. I am no longer "out there," as they say. And I didn't have to lower my standards or search outside my geographic region either. What I had to do was stop searching and start designing. That's right. I designed my boyfriend. I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys the world keeps throwing at me.

Enter AI4U, top-of-the-line virtual-companion designers. No, they're not cheap, but get real, they're custom-designing your boyfriend. If it's cheap I'm not interested. Granted, he's a Web-based AI, not a flesh-and-blood man. So what? This isn't about sex and anyway, the physical part of a relationship always fades eventually.

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The neural code is the most important scientific problem you have (probably) never heard of.

Analogous to the software of a computer, the neural code is the set of rules or the syntax that transforms the electrical pulses emitted by brain cells into perceptions, memories and decisions. Knowledge of the neural code could give us almost unlimited power over our psyches, because we could monitor and manipulate brain cells with exquisite precision by speaking to them in their own private language. The neural code could also solve one of philosophy's oldest conundrums, the mind-body problem. We may finally understand how this wrinkled lump of jelly in our skulls generates a unique self with a sense of personal identity and autonomy, a self that perceives, emotes, remembers, imagines, chooses, acts, creates.

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Most people find this notion absurd, and I understand why. We have all grown up in a period of explosive scientific progress, and so it is natural for us to assume that this progress will continue, possibly forever.

I became a science writer more than 20 years ago because I was a fervent believer in scientific progress. Science offers our best hope of understanding ourselves and our place in the universe; it can also help us create, if not a Utopia, then at least a much better world than the one we now inhabit. I also believed that science represents an "endless frontier," as physicist Vannevar Bush, founder of the National Science Foundation, put it in a famous 1945 essay.

But about 10 years ago, where once I saw challenges and opportunities, I began to see limits and barriers. We may never invent super-intelligent, autonomous machines, or spaceships that travel faster than light, because science is now bumping up against fundamental limits.

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He'd spent two weeks visiting military encampments up and down the border, training soldiers, military police and medical personnel on how to talk to Iraqis in their own language without speaking a word of Arabic.

Sarich is the vice president of VoxTec in Annapolis, Md., a division of Marine Acoustics, a military contractor. He was in Kuwait training troops to use a handheld device called the "Phraselator," a one-way language translator that's the size of a large PDA and weighs about a pound.

The Phraselator operates like an audio version of a tourist phrasebook. It's loaded with hundreds of stock phrases such as: "Halt." "Put your hands above your head." "Sit down." "Open your bag." " Show me your identification." "Do you speak English?" and the all-purpose: "We are the U.S. military. We are here to help you."

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A vocal camp in the brainy "philosophy of mind" profession believes that the Turing test should be relegated to the history books, but I'm going to assert axiomatically that the test, as it is generally understood by ordinary humans like you and me, is interesting. The question of whether computers can successfully pose as human beings has obsessed writers, filmmakers and computer scientists for decades. Therefore, without getting sucked into a philosophical vortex about the nature of minds, machines, intelligence and so forth, all we need to find out -- if we want to know if the Loebner competition matters -- is whether there exists a more respectable variant of the Turing test. As far as I can determine, there doesn't. The Turing test is, as it were, state-of-the-art.

But instead of buckling down to meet the challenge that Loebner poses, the artificial intelligence community has made a consistent effort to change the rules -- to do away, even, with the very name of their own discipline.

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Actually, not everybody does dislike him. He is beloved among sex workers, of whose rights he is a tireless advocate. Loebner also has friends, or at least people willing to hang out with him for short intervals, among the eccentric group of self-tutored hackers and robot builders who participate in the annual competition for the Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence.

Since 1989 Loebner has spent, by his account, more than $200,000 and a thousand hours of unpaid time to hasten the arrival of intelligent machines. He has set aside a gold medal and $100,000 in cash for the creator of the first machine that can pass for human. In the meantime he gives out annual prizes for programs that come closest to a long-sought holy grail in the artificial intelligence community: passing the Turing test.

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Not surprisingly, as a grown-up, Brooks is now one of the world's leading roboticists. Director of MIT's 230-person Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and founder and chairman of his own robotics company, Brooks has presided over some of the most important developments in the field that fascinates and perhaps frightens everyone who has ever seen "2001: A Space Odyssey." Indeed, among other things, his company iRobot developed the Sojourner technology used to take samples and capture images from Mars in 1997. "The first mobile ambassador from Earth to another planet," he points out, was "a creature constructed of silicon and steel."

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That's a pretty startling claim, but as Grand explains in his strangely accessible and consistently surprising book, whether or not you believe it depends on your definition of what's alive. Grand -- now two years into building a 4-month-old robot orangutan named Lucy -- argues that our traditional notion of life is just now beginning to change.

Grand spoke to Salon from his home outside of Bristol, England (where he works out of his garage), about what artificial life says about the soul, why emotions are so important to intelligence and why someday we might drive cars that enjoy doing their work.

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But Mark Pesce's new book is far more than a cannily timed shill for the toy industry. Pesce, the founding chair of the interactive media program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, is an eloquent geek optimist, firmly in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller, who hopes to bestow a future of technological breakthroughs on the minds of our children. "The Playful World" isn't a buying guide for the holidays; it is a utopian explanation of the concepts underpinning virtual reality, robotics and artificial intelligence that just happens to conflate cutting-edge technology with consumer culture and offer it up as one big steaming plate of good-for-you oatmeal.

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The shootout and the extravagant party that followed were held to celebrate the long-delayed release of Daikatana. There was just one problem: ION missed its pre-Christmas target date for the game, just as it had missed a calendar's worth of scheduled launches over the previous year and a half. Since the party, talk of a mid-January launch has come and gone, and no game has been released. At this point, gamers have stopped asking when Daikatana will hit store shelves. If they think of Daikatana at all, they're more likely to ask: When ION eventually gets this terminally late game out the door, will anyone still care?

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Remember that message? The time was the 1970s, and Bell Telephone was in the process of upgrading phone switching systems all over the country. Ma Bell, it seems, was fearful that a technologically unsophisticated customer might mistake Bell's recorded messages for an unresponsive, unfriendly, human being. Rather than risk an upset customer, the Bell system prefaced every message with a few tones, and concluded each with those oft-parodied words, "this is a recording."

Perhaps Ma Bell was being too cautious. Today those four magic words have largely been banished from the telecom lexicon, yet there's little fear among telco executives that somebody's grandma will start e-mailing complaints about rude and insensitive operators.

Ironically, if Grandma did write an e-mail about poor service, it's increasingly likely that her message might be read and replied to by a machine -- a machine engaged in the elaborate deception of pretending to be a human being.

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What a bummer. But hey, that's just Hollywood science fiction, right? Wrong, says Kevin Warwick, a professor at the department of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England -- the British equivalent of the M.I.T. Media Lab -- who has spent his career working on robotics, creating machine intelligence and, most controversially, building human-computer implants for use in his own body. Author of the recent computers-can-think book href="http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2XI8F0LGEU&mscssid=XJ2LPKP5GQSH2NPR00JP42CB5RFD5PLC&srefer=&isbn=0737294140" target="new">"March of the Machines: Why the New Race of Robots Will Rule the World," Warwick is the futurist
most likely to be quoted throughout British newspapers direly predicting that
computers may conquer the world within our lifetime. As he
himself describes his work, "It's like creating science fiction."

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Kasparov's somewhat inchoate musing manages to express a deep-seated feeling among humans when confronted with the deeds of artificial intelligence, commonly known as AI. Did Deep Blue exhibit intelligent behavior in defeating Kasparov? Did it "trick" him on occasion and play "humanlike" strategies? Might Deep Blue's performance have demonstrated a proto-conscious intelligence, one that could grow with bigger and faster computers?

Debates around the meaning of consciousness are among the quirkier instances when intense public and academic interest collide. While few outside of the ivory tower would find much of what philosophers and artificial intelligence theorists write to be bearable reading, recent articles about the logic capabilities of brainy "Kanzi the ape" have charmed all those interested in non-human cognition. Displacing Koko as the darling of the ape studies world, Kanzi's purported symbol-using skills once again remind us that humans should not be considered the only standard for determining what thinking, logic and consciousness are.

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But there's another way, according to author George Dyson -- the evolutionary way. In his ambitious new book, "Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence" (Addison-Wesley, 286 pages), Dyson suggests that a new kind of intelligence may one day emerge -- undirected and unplanned -- from the incomprehensible complexity of an interconnected, wired world.

The Net is where the intelligent action will be. In the Dysonian schema, fragments of software replicating across the Internet are analogous to strings of DNA replicating in living cells. Evolutionary pressure provides the drive: What works survives; what doesn't gets deleted, either by us or on its own.

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The Dalai Lama a trekker? Astounding, I thought to myself -- but possibly true. I already knew that the 63-year-old Tibetan Buddhist monk (who fled his homeland in 1959, after the Chinese occupation) takes an active interest in cosmology and particle physics. I knew he had spoken with neurosurgeons, mathematicians and astronomers, exploring the tantalizing territory where Eastern mysticism meets Western science. Most telling of all, I knew that, as a boy, the Dalai Lama had owned a telescope -- which he trained on the inhabitants of Lhasa as they went about their business, far below his perch atop the Potala Palace.

I searched for the picture, but in vain. Though many people at "Star Trek" confirmed its existence, no one could remember where, or even when, it had appeared. Several maddening months went by before a sympathetic "Voyager" staffer FedExed me the original slide.

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