I, For One, Welcome Our AI Overlords

A few weeks ago, for the first time ever, a computer beat the world champion of Go, one of the most complex games known to man. This was another watershed moment in the progress of artificial intelligence. To give you an idea how complex Go is, there are 2.082 10 170 possible board configurations. That is 2 with 170 zeroes after it. Chances are your brain cannot even conceive of a number that large (but a computer can). Or to give you an idea of how big of a number that is, there are only 10 80 atoms in the universe -- that is, one followed by 80 zeroes. The reason this is such a big deal is that Go is so complicated that in order to beat a top human player, a machine would have to learn how to think creatively, improvising and adapting to the situation at hand without being able to calculate every possible outcome; i.e., there has to be some serious artificial intelligence going on -- like real, creative intelligence.