"Years before the first computer was actually built, the famous British mathematician Alan Turing envisaged it playing chess and beating the human world champion. When the very first computers were delivered to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in the 1950s the scientists there immediately started to program it to play chess. For 50 years one of the recurring motifs of the science of artificial intelligence was a chess computer beating the world champion. It was almost an obsession in the community, with scores of teams in dozens of universities dedicating their academic careers to achieve this goal." Who should explore space, man or machine?

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