Russell Wald, director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, sounds off on'The Story.' Over the last few years, the rapid development of artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm as many experts believe machine learning technology will fundamentally alter the way of life for all humans. The general idea of artificial intelligence is that it represents the ability to mimic human consciousness and therefore can complete tasks that only humans can do. Artificial intelligence has various uses, such as making the most optimal decisions in a chess match, driving a family of four across the United States, or writing a 3,000 world essay for a college student. Read below to understand the concepts and abilities of the four categories of artificial intelligence.

Four hours is all it took for Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence program to learn everything there was to know about chess, The Telegraph reported Wednesday. DeepMind's AlphaZero program, which teaches itself from scratch, achieved "superhuman" knowledge of chess in less than the amount of time you'd spend, say, watching the extended version of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Chess has long been used to test the ability of artificial intelligence because the game's rigid structure is ideal for programming a computer with rules, and then letting it run its own tests against those rules. AlphaZero started this experiment knowing only the basics of chess gameplay, but by playing thousands of games against itself, AlphaZero updated its neural network with information about the effectiveness of certain moves -- over and over again, until it became the best chess player in the known universe. "The games AlphaZero played ... are far beyond anything humans or chess computers have come up with," said David Kramaley, a chess education expert.

An artificial intelligence program has become the world's best chess player in just a few hours - and it did it with almost no intervention from humans. AlphaGo Zero, developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind, is a descendant of AlphaGo - the AI program that conquered the human champion of the Chinese board game Go in 2016. After four hours of training, it took on the current world champion chess-playing program, Stockfish 8. Out of 100 games, it won 28 and drew the remaining 72. Even more impressively, it achieved this feat almost completely autonomously. The AI was given a few basic rules, such as how the different chess pieces move, but was programmed with no other strategies or tactics.

Twenty years ago IBM's Deep Blue defeated previously unbeaten chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov. Its designers tell the BBC how they won and what it means for computing.