Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal? Quanta Magazine

In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue system defeated the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. At the time, the victory was widely described as a milestone in artificial intelligence. But Deep Blue's technology turned out to be useful for chess and not much else. Computer science did not undergo a revolution. Will AlphaGo, the Go-playing system that recently defeated one of the strongest Go players in history, be any different?