Are we ready for artificial intelligence

The impressive machine dispatched the reigning (living and breathing) Go champion 4-1 in the best-of-5 series. The Go board game, which originated in China, requires complex strategic thinking with the number of possible outcomes dwarfing that in chess. AlphaGo's win demonstrates the emergence of intuition with the abstract strategic thinking not mastered in previous artificial intelligence ventures. AlphaGo's systems include'deep learning' methods, allowing the machine to run thousands of simulated scenarios to build its "experiences" to use when playing the game for real. The use of neural networks allows problem-solving without any prior programming.