For the last two decades, human cognitive superiority had a distinctive sound: the soft click of stones placed on a wooden Go board. But once again, artificial intelligence is asserting its domination over gray matter.

Just a few years ago, the best Go programs were routinely beaten by skilled children, even when given a head start. Artificial intelligence researchers routinely said that computers capable of beating our best were literally unthinkable. And so it was. Until now.

“It’s a silly human conceit that such a domain would exist, that there’s something only we can figure out with our wetware brains,” said David Doshay, a University of California at Santa Cruz computer scientist. “Because at the same time, another set of humans is just as busily saying, ‘Yes, but we can knock this problem into another domain, and solve it using these machines.’”

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One of the proving grounds for artificial intelligence is games. Classic games have a fixed set of rules, and these make it easier for researchers to develop new techniques and algorithms that enable computers to play (and hopefully win) various games. Tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess are all games where researchers have developed software that is capable of winning or drawing when paired off against the best human players in the world. Last weekend, researchers at the University of Alberta added another classic game to this list: poker. In a series of matches that took place over the Fourth of July weekend in Las Vegas, the researchers’ Polaris poker program won against a group of top-ranked online poker players.

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This spring marked the 40th anniversary of HAL, the conversational computer that was brought to life in the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Forty years after “2001,” how close are we to talking to a computer? Current applications of speech technology are a far cry from HAL.

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In 1965, artificial intelligence innovator Herbert Simon said that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” Two years later, MIT researcher Marvin Minsky predicted, “Within a generation … the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.” … Yet, here we are, decades later and what has artificial intelligence done for us lately? If you define artificial intelligence as self-aware, self-learning, mobile systems, then artificial intelligence has been a huge disappointment.

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