AI is far more than just fun and games

It all started with a magician's performance at the court of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in the late 1760s.

Among the viewers was Wolfgang von Kempelen, a brilliant - he spoke seven languages - civil servant and inventor who left the demonstration determined to one day win her majesty's favor by outdoing the conjurer's sleight-of-hand tricks.

Von Kempelen returned to the imperial court in 1770 with "The Turk", a chess-playing automaton that looked like the upper torso of an Ottoman nobleman protruding from a wooden desk whose side panels opened to reveal whirring gears and machinery.

The Turk was a formidable opponent and made short work of many of the notable people of its day. It quickly outsmarted Benjamin Franklin and dealt the great general Napoleon Bonaparte his first taste of defeat.

Alas, it was a fraud. The spinning machinery served only to dupe the credulous and camouflage a small space that concealed a chess master who moved the chess pieces with magnets.

Nevertheless, von Kempelen's invention gave birth to an idea that has become one of the dominant themes of our time: artificial intelligence. And games have been a recurrent factor in its development.

In the 1950s, World Chess Champion Mikhail Botvinnik began working on a chess computer program that would "think" instead of merely calculate. In 1997, a chess computer won a match against World Champion Garry Kasparov.

Last March, Go master Lee Sedol was humbled by a Go computer.

And in January, a poker program named Libratrus relieved four top players of more than $1.7 million in chips.

That feat was a milestone because the program's makers didn't teach the computer to play poker. "We gave it the rules ... and said 'learn on your own' ", co-maker Noam Brown told The Guardian.

In addition, poker, unlike chess or Go, is a game with "imperfect information" - you can't see your opponents' hands and you have to take account of them bluffing and learn how and when to bluff yourself.

But AI's significance goes far beyond games. It is about to revolutionize daily life.

Andrew Ng, director of Baidu's AI research, recently told The Atlantic, "I have a hard time thinking of an industry we cannot transform with AI."

Baidu and other Chinese tech giants such as Didi and Tencent each have AI research labs and are working to produce marketable products. And China has become the world's hotbed of AI research, according to a recent South China Morning Post report.

We stand at the dawn of new age, and live in a place that is helping lead its development.

I had the good fortune as a boy to know my father's grandfather, a man born in the 1860s. I've often thought about the great changes he saw during his long life. It is with awe that I've begun to realize that I may see many more changes than he did.

Contact the writer at lydon@chinadaily.com.cn