We're a week into the school summer holidays here in England, and I wonder how many parents who started out determined to keep their children completely away from screens are now beginning to feel the strain. When my sons were much younger, I often had these idyllic images in my head of day trips to the seaside, back garden treasure hunts, paddling in the river, visiting relatives … an endless series of character forming experiences which I imagined in grainy Kodachrome colours. Then I'd be faced with the reality of having a job, and also the, let's say, limited attention span of my sons. Sheepishly, we'd end up allowing some Fortnite time to catch our breath. There is so much pressure and guilt around children and gaming, especially during long school breaks, and I think we need to seriously redress our outlook as a society.

It may be simple, as News 19's Steve Johnson remarked to Dr. William Marx, the Vice President and Chief Technology office at Intuitive Research and Technology. "It is, well, it's more difficult than tic-tac-toe, but it's easy enough that people can understand it when we wrap artificial intelligence around it," Marx explained. After playing the classic kids game, Steve and Marx moved to a computer version pitting two players together – both in the world of artificial intelligence. "This allows us to present artificial intelligence to people in a way they can hopefully understand, showing off algorithms, and search methods, pruning in trees, and all this kind of stuff difficult for people to grasp," Marx stated. "For instance, we're capturing every move made, the total number of moves evaluated. See how that number is going up? The artificial intelligence in the cloud is calculating all those possible moves for what's going on" It's what the artificial intelligence in the so-called cloud can do that's impressive: A massive network of computers working together to look for patterns, to calculate future moves, and to be predictive.