The Future Of Robots, Artificial Intelligence And Computer Science

Way back in the 1980s, a schoolteacher challenged me to write a computer program that played tic-tac-toe. But just a couple of weeks ago, I explained to one of my computer science graduate students how to solve tic-tac-toe using the so-called "Minimax algorithm," and it took us about an hour to write a program to do it. Certainly my coding skills have improved over the years, but computer science has come a long way too. What seemed impossible just a couple of decades ago is startlingly easy today. In 1997, people were stunned when a chess-playing IBM computer named Deep Blue beat international grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. In 2015, Google revealed that its DeepMind system had mastered several 1980s-era video games, including teaching itself a crucial winning strategy in "Breakout."