Every time there's a "breakthrough" in AI, this question crops up. Consciousness is poorly understood and there's no good reason to think it's a product of in

Every time there's a "breakthrough" in AI, this question crops up. Consciousness is poorly understood and there's no good reason to think it's a product of intelligence. In this case, all that's happened is that a game played by people can now be played well by a computer program which is designed specifically to recognize patterns. (A go position is just a 19x19 array of trits.) Computer programs reached human-level performance decades ago at chequers/draughts, and later at chess and backgammon. Those programs did not lead to a general AI.