AI, IoT, and Machine Learning, Oh My!

AI and Machine Learning grew up and matured in the world of gaming -- pitting computational power and algorithmic mastery against the best human players up for the challenge of taking on a machine. It may have taken decades, but machines eventually asserted their dominance. In 1997 IBM's Big Blue defeated chess master Garry Gasparov; In 2011 IBM Watson defeated two of Jeopardy's greatest champions; and most recently, Google's AlphaGo bested reigning champ Lee Sedol in the game of GO, a 2,500-year-old game that's exponentially more complex than chess and, form the human perspective, requires intuition as well as calculation to execute a winning strategy. Machine Learning owes its current prowess to gaming in a literal sense. The holy grail of computer science has always been to create intelligent machines that can perceive the world as we do, understand our language, and learn from examples.