As far back as the industrial revolution, significant development in technical innovation has succeeded in transforming numerous manual tasks and processes that had been in existence for decades where humans had reached the limits of physical capacity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers this same transformative potential for the augmentation and potential replacement of human tasks and activities within a wide range of industrial, intellectual and social applications. The pace of change for this new AI technological age is staggering, with new breakthroughs in algorithmic machine learning and autonomous decision-making, engendering new opportunities for continued innovation. The impact of AI could be significant, with industries ranging from: finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, supply chain, logistics and utilities, all potentially disrupted by the onset of AI technologies. The study brings together the collective insight from a number of leading expert contributors to highlight the significant opportunities, realistic assessment of impact, challenges and potential research agenda posed by the rapid emergence of AI within a number of domains: business and management, government, public sector, and science and technology. This research offers significant and timely insight to AI technology and its impact on the future of industry and society in general, whilst recognising the societal and industrial influence on pace and direction of AI development.

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We test a variety of blocking and smearing algorithms for constructing glueball and string wave-functionals, and find some with much improved overlaps onto the lightest states. We use these algorithms to obtain improved results on the tensions of k-strings in SU(4), SU(6), and SU(8) gauge theories. We emphasise the major systematic errors that still need to be controlled in calculations of heavier k-strings, and perform calculations in SU(4) on an anisotropic lattice in a bid to minimise one of these. All these results point to the k-string tensions lying partway between the 'MQCD' and 'Casimir Scaling' conjectures, with the power in 1/N of the leading correction lying ∈ [1, 2]. We also obtain some evidence for the presence of quasi-stable strings in calculations that do not use sources, and observe some near-degeneracies between (excited) strings in different representations. We also calculate the lightest glueball masses for N = 2, ..., 8, and extrapolate to N = ∞, obtaining results compatible with earlier work. We show that the N = ∞ factorisation of the Euclidean correlators that are used in such mass calculations does not make the masses any less calculable at large N.

We extend our earlier investigation of the finite temperature deconfinement transition in SU(N) gauge theories, with the emphasis on what happens as N → ∞. We calculate the latent heat, L h , in the continuum limit, and find the expected behaviour, L h ∝ N 2 , at large N. We confirm that the phase transition, which is second order for SU(2) and weakly first order for SU(3), becomes robustly first order for N ≥ 4 and strengthens as N increases. As an aside, we explain why the SU(2) specific heat shows no sign of any peak as T is varied across what is supposedly a second order phase transition. We calculate the effective string tension and electric gluon masses at T ≃ T c confirming the discontinuous nature of the transition for N ≥ 3. We explicitly show that the large-N 'spatial' string tension does not vary with T for T ≤ T c and that it is discontinuous at T = T c . For T ≥ T c it increases ∝ T 2 to a good approximation, and the k-string tension ratios closely satisfy Casimir Scaling. Within very small errors, we find a single T c at which all the k-strings deconfine, i.e. a step-by-step breaking of the relevant centre symmetry does not occur. We calculate the interface tension but are unable to distinguish between the ∝ N or ∝ N 2 variations, each of which can lead to a striking but different N = ∞ deconfinement scenario. We remark on the location of the bulk phase transition, which bounds the range of our large-N calculations on the strong coupling side, and within whose hysteresis some of our larger-N calculations are performed.