Gadgetory

no computers are not taking over but they're really good at board games I'm Jeff Bakalar filling in for Bridget Carey and this is your cnet update so a super computer program by google just beat world champion Lisa doll at go which is an ancient and complex board game Google's bot named alpha go is part of the company's artificial intelligence team now the competition took place at google's deepmind challenge in south korea where the game has been streamed more than 3 million times so of course whenever a computer beats a human at something the internet seems to freak out about an imminent takeover but most experts in the field still reassure us that while a robot can be really good at something like playing a game the AI that would be needed for more complex things like world domination yeah that's still mostly science fiction Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that he's most excited about Amazon's echo the personal assistant has begun to pick up a lot of momentum even before the woz endorsement because of its ease of use and always listening for Matt you don't need to pick anything up you just talk and it works woz believes it'll be the next big platform for the near future so some really interesting Twitter data is suggesting that mining the social network for key information about the aftermath of superstorm sandy might have been more accurate than government models in assessing the damage in accurate mapping delayed the region's recovery by what's estimated at months and amazingly enough tweets from residents on the ground have proved to be more of an accurate geographical representation for narrowing down the damage at the south by southwest conference in austin texas President Obama was asked about the government's involvement in the controversial iPhone security situation while he couldn't comment on the specific FBI vs apple case he did talk about the ways in which we view data and his opinion that we cannot have an absolutist view on data as a whole Obama went on to reassure that there should be a government overreach when it comes to privacy but the quickly evolving world of technology certainly makes that a tough situation to balance and finally cross console play may not be such a far-fetched reality today Microsoft announced its support for cross-network play meeting one day Xbox players could play against PC and PlayStation users there is a catch though no one has taken up the offer to allow for cross-play just yet meaning we may not see widespread PlayStation and Xbox compatibility but it's definitely cool to know that the door has been opened that'll do it for this tech news update for everything else head over to cnet.com from our Studios here in New York I'm Jeff back alone