Come on, Let's Give the Robots Hands Already

Sure, Alphago--a Google computer that plays the game Go--beat Lee Sedol, the world's reigning master of the game. The machine revolution is nigh! Except there's one crucial thing AlphaGo couldn't do: pick up those black and white Go stones and put them down on the board. A Google programmer had to do that. "Maybe the hardest part is not playing the game but moving the pieces," says Siddhartha Srinivasa, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University.