Taking baby steps towards software that reasons like humans

New York

RICHARD Socher appeared nervous as he waited for his artificial intelligence program to answer a simple question: "Is the tennis player wearing a cap?" The word "processing" lingered on his laptop's display for what felt like an eternity. Then the program offered the answer a human might have given instantly: "Yes."

Mr Socher, who clenched his fist to celebrate his small victory, is the founder of one of a torrent of Silicon Valley startups intent on pushing variations of a new generation of pattern recognition software, which, when combined with increasingly vast sets of data, is revitalising the field of artificial intelligence.