ARTIFICIAL intelligence systems have mastered some of mankind's best creations and natural intuitions. These AI systems notched some of the first wins for the machines. Artificial intelligence and table games make a good pair because humans have been trying to develop perfect tactics for strategy games for decades or even centuries. Chess is "known as a game that requires strategy, foresight, logic--all sorts of qualities that make up human intelligence," IBM researcher Murray Campbell told Scientific American. Campbell and a team developed Deep Blue, a six-foot supercomputer that defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a six-game series in 1997.

A four-legged robot took only an hour to learn how to walk without stumbling, roughly the same amount of time as newborn foals need. Felix Ruppert and Alexander Badri-Sprowitz at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, designed the half-metre-high robot called Morti and gave it the ability to teach itself how to walk, rather than to execute a preprogrammed gait. Morti is controlled by an artificial intelligence algorithm that doesn't have much information about the robot's legs, such as the exact shape of each component. The AI mimics networks of neurons that some animals have in their spinal cords and which help them walk by making their muscles contract in a predictable rhythm. The AI generates walking instructions for Morti to follow.