Nearly two decades have passed since China     1    (send) the first Beidou satellite into space in 2000. During that time, more Beidou satellites were sent into orbit (轨道),     2     (form) the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BDS). In late 2012, it began providing positioning, navigation, timing and messaging     3     (service) to people in China and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. At the end of 2018, BDS started to serve users worldwide. Now with two more Beidou satellites     4     (launch) on Dec 16, 2019, BDS has 53 satellites in orbit.

Can a Robot Really Freestyle?

Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, led by Gil Weinberg, have designed the first musical robot capable of not only playing music, but creating it. His name is Shimon. Weinberg, who is a musician, engineer, and professor of musical technology, found himself in a creative rut (俗套) and decided to create a robot that could inspire him with new musical ideas. Shimon was trained on a vast data set of everything from progressive rock to jazz to rap. His works really surprise human listeners.

Up until recent advancements, applications of AI (artificial intelligence) have mostly consisted of well-defined tasks, but many are concerned that new technology like Shimon could result in lost jobs for millions of people, even those in creative industry.

While the concern of an offing future in which humans are entirely replaced by robots certainly isn’t unfounded, a much more likely future is one in which robots work alongside humans to improve their work. Experts say that AI will actually create jobs for humans, not des troy them. The Guardian recently reported that by 2037, AI will create more than 7 million new jobs in the healthcare, education, and science fields in the UK.

Shimon is showing us what can happen when robots don’t just work for us, but with us. Instead of putting any of our favorite musicians out of work, robots will certainly be challenging and inspiring them in new ways. The cooperation between humans and robots can produce new and attractive music, leading to novel musical outcomes. Thanks to the innovation of Weinberg and his team, rap battles, Jam sessions, and symphony orchestras alike may begin to look and act considerably different.

4 . NASA’s spacecraft Dart hit an asteroid (小行星) 11.3 million kilometers away at a speed, changing the asteroid’s orbit and lowered its cycle period by 15 minutes, the space organization announced on Monday.

Some said the move shows the world might now be able to prevent asteroids—the kind that made the dinosaurs extinct—from hitting the Earth. The asteroid that was controlled belonged to a double-asteroid system. It had a 160-meter diameter while the other asteroid’s diameter is over 500 meters. The bigger asteroid can be compared to the one that ended the dinosaur era 67 million years ago. A hit from an asteroid that size can cause unimaginable destruction.

However, it is too early to assert that the world has gained the ability to prevent asteroids from hitting us. The asteroid that was controlled was only 160 meters in size. Its cycle period was changed, without changing its orbit significantly. It is still not clear if the orbit of a much larger asteroid headed toward the Earth can be changed successfully.

In brief, NASA’s success in changing the course of a harmful asteroid is definitely praiseworthy, but much more needs to be done before we can say the world’s security from some unpredictable asteroid is guaranteed.

It should be noted that changing the orbit of an asteroid involves more than just sending an object into space and commanding it to hit the asteroid. While it is hard enough to hit an asteroid, it is even more difficult to lock onto one in the first place. It means having the ability to observe approaching asteroids, measuring their respective speeds, and deciding which ones might pose a danger to the Earth.

Therefore, there’s more to Dart hitting the asteroid than meets the eye. And these are key areas where global scientists need to work harder in the future.

5 . Have you ever wondered what happens to all of the old object s launched into space, such as rockets and satellites? It’s called space junk, and much of it is still out there now. According to NASA, the definition of space junk is “any man-made object in orbit (轨道) around Earth that no longer serves a useful function”.

One large piece of space junk, an abandoned rocket, hit the dark side of the moon on March 4. The rocket’s origin is not clear, but scientists know that it was massive—weighing about 3 tons. It must have left a large crater (坑), estimated 10 to 20 meters wide, on the moon’s surface. It won’t be visible right away, but scientists are trying to locate it. “We will find the crater, eventually,” Mark Robinson, lead investigator for NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, told USA TODAY. “Depending on its location, it could take as long as 28 days.”

What’s significant about this space junk crash is that it draws attention to some of the potential dangers of space junk. First, the accumulation of space junk in Earth’s orbit means that satellites and the International Space Station (ISS) are at risk. In 2016, tiny space debris (残骸),smaller than a millimeter, caused a tiny chip in the ISS’ window. Imagine the damage that a larger piece of debris could cause. The European Space Agency website states that objects “up to 1 cm in size could disable an instrument or a critical flight system on a satellite” while objects over 10 cm “could shatter a satellite or spacecraft into pieces”. If this sounds terrifying, that’s because it is. Any collision (碰撞) with larger pieces of debris could be especially dangerous for manned spacecraft.

In addition to potential damage to spacecraft and satellites, space junk also poses a threat to the Earth itself Crashes can send debris into the atmosphere where it can remain for many decades. Some powerful collisions can even send large debris hurtling (猛冲) toward Earth’s surface where it can affect the local environment. Leftover rocket debris can contain toxic materials that are harmful to plant and animal life. Some people in Siberia have even reported serious health problems after rocket debris landed in their regions in 2012, a local doctor told the BBC.

6 . Teaming up with AI

First the robots came for our jobs. Now they’re coming for our hobbies. Google’s DeepMind AI has been busy the past few years, creating programs to take on human players across a variety of games. In 2016 its AlphaGo beat the best Go player in the world. Earlier this year, its AlphaStar defeated two middle — tier players at the popular online game StarCraft II. Now it’s learning to win at multiplayer games.

“Artificially intelligent agents are getting better and better at two-player games, but most real-world endeavors (努力) require teamwork,” DeepMind’s researchers wrote in a paper published in Science in June.

To be sure, computers have been proving their dominance over humans in one-on-one turn-based games such as chess ever since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Russian chess master Garry Kasparov in 1997.

However, successfully using teamwork to win in multiplayer games with complex environments was difficult to achieve.

For this purpose, DeepMind’s researchers designed AI agents that taught themselves how to play first-person game Quake III Arena. The team, led by Maz Jaderberg, worked on a modified version of Quake III Arena.

The game mode they chose was “Capture the Flag”. All the players must work together to steal the other team’s flag while safeguarding their own.

The AI agents “trained” with 12 hours of game data, then matched up against professional game testers. The AI won 75 percent of the time, even when its reaction time artificially slowed down to human levels and when their aiming ability was similarly reduced.

And in order to make improvements, the programmers used various kinds of “rewards” to help the AI players weigh their goals and actions to help them cooperate in the teamwork. They also used randomized maps for each new match.

“That meant the solutions that the agents find have to be general — they cannot just memorize a sequence of actions,” said co-author Wojciech Czarnecki.

The only time humans were able to beat the AI agents was when they teamed up together. A team of one human and one AI agent had a five percent greater win possibility than a team of just AI agents.

Ethan Gach said at the video game news website Kotaku, “It suggests that the AI program is able to play with non-AI teammates.” In the near future, AI may cooperate with human beings in some other fields, such as medicine and other branches of science.

Nearly two decades    1     (pass) since China sent the first Beidou satellite into space in 2000. During that time, more Beidou satellites were sent into orbit (轨道),     2     (form) the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BDS). In late 2012, it began providing positioning, navigation, timing and messaging     3     (service) to people in China and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. At the end of 2018, BDS started to serve users worldwide. Now with two more Beidou satellites     4     (launch) on Dec 16, 2019, BDS has 53 satellites in orbit.