"The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined

"The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force." The Chess Master and the Computer by Garry Kasparov http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-che... What you describe is a very similar situation to that of the one IBM had after creating Deep Blue. They got the results that they had aimed for, but reached it by means that they hadn't expected (or even wanted). The implications of this are the effects it has on the potential applications and projects based off of it. Using brute force to solve these projects will not always work - at some point, this method will have to be replaced by another one. Instead of bringing computers closer to the human brain, these projects are revealing the large gap between them. In my opinion, the "Next Big Thing" should be a proper merge of the intelligence between computers and humans. Each has their own strengths, and trying to recreate and incorporate the complexities of the human brain into our computers may not be possible. Instead we should put the efforts into finding a way to connect the two and discovering a common interface between them.