“For millennia, humans have played games with each other, exploring the limits of human thought and strategy. During the digital era, more and more individuals are starting to play games with machines, with the first computer game Spacewar invented in 1962 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This two-player game involved sparring spaceships that fire photon torpedoes at one another. Each player maneuvers a spacecraft and scores by hitting his opponent in the game. Seemingly a simple concept, this game runs on a computer the size of a large car!

Today, individuals are playing far more sophisticated games with computers. No longer do they require two human players, as computers can now artificially simulate the actions of humans with stunning accuracy. With the increase in machines’ computational power and the development of artificial intelligence, they are becoming much better than ever before at simulating human behavior. Machines are winning so much so that they are inspiring doubts about the future of humanity.

In 2017, Google’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence was pitted against the world’s best Go player, Ke Jie. Go is one of the world’s oldest board games, having been invented more than 2,000 years ago in ancient China, where it has been called weiqi. On a nineteen-by-nineteen board filled with black and white stone pieces, this game has so many possible moves that a computer with merely pre-programmed rules will struggle to decipher it. After the first two moves of chess, 400 subsequent steps exist; however, for Go, there are 130,000 possibilities. Players of this game need not only knowledge of the rules and strategies but an almost zen-like state of mind to navigate its dizzying complexity. Believed to have been invented more than 2,500 years ago, Go’s heritage is more profound than any board game played today.”

The article: China’s Digital Transformation