Computers are already better than humans at chess (and I can recall a time, back in the eighties, when there were predictions that this would never happen, or at least not for many decades), but they still don't do that well at Go.

Well, that may be changing:

Two Hungarian scientists have now come up with an algorithm that helps computers pick the right move in Go, played by millions around the world, in which players must capture spaces by placing black and white marbles on a board in turn.

"On a nine by nine board we are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player," said Levente Kocsis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' computing lab SZTAKI.

The 19 by 19 board which top players use is still hard for a machine, but the new method is promising because it makes better use of the growing power of computers than earlier Go software.

I, for one, welcome our go-playing overlords.

I'm not a Go player. But watching George Jetson taught me never to play Jupiter Gin with a Uniblab unit.

Huge advances on a 9x9 board do not imply significant improvements on a 19x19 board.

Go, schmo. Get back to me when a computer can take an image of a crowded airport departure lounge and within 100 ms recognize a face last seen 10 years ago with fewer wrinkles, a different haircut, and without glasses.

I don't know why anyone is impressed that computers can play logical games fast. That's their speciality. It'd be like being really impressed that a computer can add five hundred 20-digit integers in a millisecond. Or that a jackhammer can break apart a solid granite boulder in one blow.

Going along with what Carl said, game playing doesn't seem that spectacular to me if you have to have a human create the algorithm that picks the moves. When you have a computer that can create its own algorithms based on its game-play experience, then you might have something. But if a human programs it, then all you're doing is re-creating a human player that doesn't give in to its emotions or stress levels. And that's not all that spectacular, IMO.

Carl, John,

The impressive part is that as complex as chess is, it is played on a puny 8x8 board. Go is played on a 19x19 board, making it more computationally complex not just by a few orders of magnitude, but by a a few orders of magnitude of powers of two.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I played Go to about the middle of the amateur rating scale (11 que, on a good day). The difference between my skills and those of a decent mid-range professional player are roughly equivalent to the difference in driving distance between my 3 year old and Toger Woods. The pros are THAT good.

To have a computer play to a roughly professional level (I presume 1-2 Dan) even on a 9x9 board is nothing short of astounding.

Think of it as someone actually delivering 100 metric tons of cargo to orbit for an incremental cost of $20/kg, twice in one day. And living to collect the fee :-)