Artificial intelligence is a fun topic -- especially when it's applied to playing games with humans. The classic "man vs. machine" battles are always entertaining... until we hit the Singularity, and computer AI just consistently trounces humans in everything. Here are a few more examples of cool AI projects.

• Microsoft Research is working on AI that can play the ancient game of Go -- and incorporating it into an XBox Live game called The Path of Go. This is a pretty cool project to try to get more people playing go, but adding avatars and some storyline about finding your missing twin doesn't sound like a more fun way to play Go to me. [url]
• Starcraft is another AI challenge that requires more than fast reflexes and a pulse. Instead of creating supercomputers that play MMORPGs perfectly, I'd settle for AI that just happily mines gold for me all day. [url]
• Computers can also beat us at really simple games that you wouldn't think need any intelligence to play. So don't play Rock-Paper-Scissors to the death, and never wage a land war in Asia. [url]
• Maybe football coaches should be replaced by computers, too. When your fantasy league is short human players, try a few bots as competitive players. [url]
• If only the neural nets that play 20 questions were a bit more useful... These kinds of programs were supposed to help diagnose medical diseases, but now they just play trivial games and advertise for Whoppers. [url]
• To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.