One of the key reasons Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) stock is one of the most valuable on Wall Street -- with a market cap of $884 billion -- is that the company is willing to take bold initiatives. True, sometimes things fall short, as seen with the move into the smartphone business. But for the most part, CEO Jeff Bezos has been able to make the right strategic decisions and deploy resources in a disciplined way. Perhaps the best example of this is AWS (Amazon Web Services). Without this, AMZN stock would likely have a much lower valuation today. The irony is that the company was not the ideal player to be the winner in the cloud.

Needless to say, there are a lot of complex issues surrounding the Kasparov-Deep Blue rivalry; but for IBMer Eric Rose, it inspired him to explore how chess AI has evolved in the two decades since then. He found that the Stockfish open-source chess engine is considered to be one of the best, and he was further inspired to make a Linux -based chess app available on the cloud using Bluemix and IBM containers. Fortunately for us, he documented his processes in a new article, in which he describes how he created a Docker image containing Stockfish and websocketd. By using IBM containers on Bluemix to run his Docker container, he was able to expose the Stockfish Linux application as a service that's available on the cloud. I'll leave it to greater minds than mine to debate whether AI is an existential threat to human existence.