● When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, there was still a feeling that AI could never really mimic human intelligence in any meaningful way. After all, even Deep Blue used brute force rather than pattern recognition, chunked knowledge, or other “human” methods, such as reading body language, overcoming exhaustion, and avoiding mistakes. It just so happens that chess can be won by brute force. But there’s another game that cannot.
● The Chinese game Go, which is much more complex than chess, is played on a 19-by-19 board of squares with 361 black and white stones. It’s too big a matrix to allow brute-force methods like exhaustive search to thrive and, as Kasparov writes, “too subtle to be decided by the tactical blunders that define human losses to computers at chess.” Instead, Go* is revered as a uniquely human game, requiring creativity, intuition, and perseverance. It’s a game of 9 simple rules but many complex strategies. The number of possible positions on the board exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe.
● That’s why it was so shocking to Musk and many others tracking the ascent of AI when, in 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat one of the world’s best Go players: 33-year-old Lee Sedol, who had 18 world championships under his belt at the time. AI expert and Taiwanese venture capitalist KaiFu Lee calls it China’s Sputnik moment, as it launched a frenzy of research and work in AI in the East.

From Great Courses (link to follow)