New Scientist: After spending so long shrouded in a self-inflicted winter of discontent, the much-maligned field of artificial intelligence (AI) is in bloom again, writes Anil Ananthaswamy for New Scientist. Lying close to the heart of AI’s revival is a technique called probabilistic programming, which combines the logical underpinnings of the old AI with the power of statistics and probability. “It’s a natural unification of two of the most powerful theories that have been developed to understand the world and reason about it,” says Stuart Russell, a pioneer of modern AI at the University of California, Berkeley.