The world's best player of what might be humankind's most complicated board game was defeated on Tuesday by a Google computer program. Adding insult to potentially deep existential injury, he was defeated at Go -- a game that claims centuries of play by humans -- in China, where the game was invented. The human contender, a 19-year-old Chinese national named Ke Jie, and the computer are only a third of the way through their three-game match this week. And the contest does little to prove that software can mollify an angry co-worker, write a decent poem, raise a well-adjusted child or perform any number of distinctly human tasks. But the victory by software called AlphaGo showed yet another way that computers could be developed to perform better than humans in highly complex tasks, and it offered a glimpse of the promise of new technologies that mimic the way the brain functions.

The world's best player of what might be humankind's most complicated board game was defeated on Tuesday by a Google computer program. Adding insult to potentially deep existential injury, he was defeated at Go -- a game that claims centuries of play by humans -- in China, where the game was invented. The human contender, a 19-year-old Chinese national named Ke Jie, and the computer still have two more matches to play this week. And the matchup does little to prove that software can mollify an angry co-worker, write a decent poem, raise a well-adjusted child or perform any number of mundane yet distinctly human tasks. But the victory by software called AlphaGo showed yet another way that computers can be developed to perform better than humans in highly complex tasks, and it offered a glimpse of the promise of new technologies that mimic the way the brain functions.