In this podcast we hear from machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, who believes that creating a true artificial intelligence will only be possible once machines have something that babies are born with: the ability to interact with the world, observe what happens, and adapt to the consequences of their actions.

We'll find out how such agency helps us learn, what it could mean for computers to have it too, and hear about Bengio's work introducing it into an area of machine learning called deep learning.

And, in honour of the mathematician Ron Graham who sadly passed away in July, we celebrate our very favourite number, Graham's number, by telling you about it in just one minute.

You can find out more about Bengio's take on agency, machine learning, and about Graham's number in these articles:
https://plus.maths.org/content/agent-perspective-0
https://plus.maths.org/content/what-machine-learning

The music in the podcast is by Oli Freke and the track is called Line-1. You can listen to more of Oli's music on Soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/olifreke

Emergence is a concept that's become quite famous in popular culture, but still has a ring of the magical and mystical about it. In this podcast we talk to Chris Budd, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, about what emergence is and where we can observe it.

We also listen to some music that has emerged from cellular automaton, and see how one can go about modelling the behaviour of those most complex of animals: human beings. And as usual, we will explore some maths in one minute.

The music in this podcast was created using the software Visions of Chaos, produced by Softology:
https://softology.com.au/index.htm

You can listen to a longer version of the piece on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZu5LQ56T18&ab_channel=Softology