Artificial Intelligence's Winners and Losers

The board game Go is older and more complex than chess. While it's been 20 years since IBM's Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov, computers only started beating Go experts a few years ago. An Oct. 18 report in the science journal Nature tells us that this particular man/machine contest is done. A system built by the DeepMind unit of Alphabet (ticker: GOOGL) beat Go's reigning world champ 100 games to none. The deposed champ, you should know, is a prior version of the same artificial intelligence system, which beat one of humankind's international champions in 2016.