Germany came late to the European colonial race but, once united in 1867, sought to catch up, convinced of the superior genius of its Volk. Two world wars on, the country again finds itself pitted against others in a new struggle for the top. In a Bavarian town near where two old German-speaking empires met, AI Prof Patrick Glauner explores the Zeitgeist of this new Superintelligenz on day 17 of The Yuan’s intelligent discovery voyage.

The Yuan’s voyage of intelligent discovery sails on day 16 for Cambridge. The motto of this storied university town amid eastern England’s reed-grown fens is Literis Antiquis Novis Institutis Decora - Distinguished for Classical Learning and New Institutions - composed in 1846 by Edward Everett, US ambassador to the UK and president of Harvard College - in another Cambridge. Computational physicist Roger Kingdon discourses on Google’s Bard and other ‘new institutions.’

A Malay prince saw an orange beast at a river mouth in 1299. Though undoubtedly a tiger, he was told it was a lion. This omen induced him to build a city there - Singapura - from Sanskrit singa (lion) and pura (city). From that ex-British Far East fortress, on day 15 of The Yuan’s journey of smart discovery tech Prof Jeffrey Lee Funk forecasts that AI’s ‘emergence’ may prove as elusive as a lion in Lion City.

Whether machines will ever outsmart humans is a question of the use of language and the inadequacy of programming because, on their own, machines are not clever, says Nigel Morris-Cotterill, author of The Yuan’s ‘Imaginary Friends’ series, on day 14 of The Yuan’s voyage of intelligent discovery.

Ancient Greeks used a marked table - abax - to calculate, but the true ‘abacus’ is a 5,000-year-old Babylonian invention diffused to the rest of the world. On day 13 of our intelligent discovery quest, writing from the East-West trade hub of Mumbai, The Yuan columnist Satyen K. Bordoloi likens seeing smartness in AI to ascribing sentience to an abacus.