AI experts thought a computer couldn't beat a human at Go until the year 2100

Artificial intelligence experts in the '90s thought it would take at least another century for researchers to accomplish what Google did just two weeks ago. AI experts thought it could take until the year 2100, if not longer, for people to create an AI system that can beat a human at Go, according to a 1997 New York Times article posted on Reddit's futurology thread by user Yull-Ban. Google's AI system AlphaGo made history when it beat Go champion Lee Sedol four times in a five-game tournament earlier this month. The feat was seen as a major milestone in the AI community since IBM's Deep Blue computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. That's because beating Go, a game with more than 300 times the number of plays as chess, requires sophisticated pattern recognition.