6. They can beat grandmasters at their own game
In the year 1996, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov faced off against Deep Blue, a supercomputer which could compute more than 200 million chess moves per second. The man fared admirably against the machine, losing in only one of six matches. Yet, that match was notable because never before had a supercomputer defeated a grandmaster in chess.
More recently, Google’s supercomputer, AlphaGo, took on Lee Se-Dol, a South Korean Go grandmaster. The objective of Go is for one player, using black pieces, to surround another player’s white pieces on a gridded board, and vice versa. The maximum number of possible moves for Go has been estimated to exceed the total number of atoms in the visible universe, making it an incredibly complex game. Lee lost three consecutive matches to AlphaGo before clawing back one victory in the fourth match and surrendering to AlphaGo in the fifth.
