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Bernie Bamford, a 38-year-old aeronautical engineer from Chester in England caused a stir last week with his claim to have found the fabled lost City of Atlantis. Mr Bamford spotted a grid pattern on the sea bad 620 miles off the coast of Africa.

On Google Maps

The first mention of Atlantis is by Plato in 360 BC. According to Plato, Atlantis was a naval power lying, "in front of the Pillars of Hercules" or the Straights of Gibraltar.

He claimed Atlantis conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa about 9600 BC. After a failed attempt to invade Athens, Atlantis sank into the ocean, "in a single day and night of misfortune."

The legend of Atlantis has grown since then. The Nazis thought Atlanteans were the ancestors of their master race. New Age legend has Atlanteans with psychic powers responsible for building everything from the Pyramids to Stonehenge. Popular culture places Atlantis in another Galaxy.

So, the discovery what looks like a street pattern on the sea bed caused quite a stir. However, there are a few problems with the picture. The first is scale. The area covered by the grid is 20 times as big as Greater London. The second is that the lines do not actually appear on the seabed but are an artifact of the way the map making process.

In a statement Google said:

"It's true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth -- a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species, a fringing coral reef off the coast of Australia, and the remains of an Ancient Roman villa, to name just a few.

"In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artefact of the data collection process.

"Bathymetric (or seafloor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the seafloor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.

So the fabled Lost City of Atlantis Remains lost, who knows it could be in another Galaxy.

A recent competition pitting Artificial Intelligences (AI) against each other has been won by a system designed to take free kicks like a professional soccer player.

Martin Rhodes and Simon Coupland from De Montfort University, England, developed the "Pro Evolutionary Soccer" AI. In the competition, they presented a 15-minute demonstration of free kicks taken within a soccer simulation. Several of the examples were based on real free kicks, including one by LA Galaxy and England free kick specialist, David Beckham.

Whilst players like Beckham use years of experience to judge the spin and power to place on a ball, the AI creates many solutions and tests them to see which are most likely to give a goal.

The AI rejects obvious failures, slightly alters the best and then uses these altered solutions as input for the the next generation of calculations. This way the system “evolves” a solution. A process known as an evolutionary algorithm.

The developers see an application in video games. They say:

The current generation of football video games suffers from a predictable, repetitive style of gameplay. Pro-Evolutionary soccer uses a stochastic approach to give varied, organic style of play in the form of free-kick taking. Given a physics model and the positions of the opposing team, our system finds a near optimal free kick from all possible free kicks giving a varied and challenging gameplay.

Pro Evolutionary Soccer faced some tough competition. Other competitors included a robot that can locate and then follow a person in a complex environment and an AI avatar called Halo, who lives in Second Life.

Have you met Halo yet?
Did you realize you were interacting with an AI?