Now it's GO's turn.

Google has announced it has made a breakthrough in programming a computer to play GO. Up until now, programmers hadn't been able to write a decent GO program, at least not compared to human masters. But Google (and perhaps soon, Facebook) has created a program that has beaten the best human player in Europe by a 5-0 margin.

The research has implications beyond an old Chinese board game. The systems used by Facebook and Google were not preprogrammed with specific if-this-then-do-that code or explicitly told the rules. Instead, they learned to play at a very high level by themselves. These techniques can be adapted to any problem "where you have a large amount of data that you have to find insights in," Hassabis said.

One of the programmers also created a similar program for chess:

DeepMind [Google's AI research group] recently hired Matthew Lai, a London researcher who developed a system capable of playing chess at the grandmaster level. His software was able to reason in a way similar to how humans do, a more efficient method than IBM's attempt to crunch every possible outcome before making a move in the 1990s.

Here's more on Lai's prior chess program, Giraffe. Giraffe is impressive, but still not up to snuff with the best "regular" chess programs.