> If you look at the progression in computer chess programs, where they were pathetic for the longest time until things came together and the performance of the

> If you look at the progression in computer chess programs, where they were pathetic for the longest time until things came together and the performance of them rose exponentially, matching and then eclipsing grandmasters, it's inevitable that the same pattern will play out in the artificial intelligence space. Chess programs started beating grandmasters when they built computers big enough to recurse a few dozen levels down the dynamic programming tree. Other than a few brainy programming optimizations and some well-chosen search heuristics (like e.g. learning all of Kasparov's opening repertoire) it was all brawn as far as I know. With its countable state space and discrete, turn-based dynamics, chess actually strikes me as one of the easier AI problems you can pose. If you want a sense of how truly far away we are from real AI go check out what they are doing in computer vision. Classification performance on tasks that a four-year-old could execute without error is in the single digits in some cases (http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/analysis/ http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/analysis/). It is indeed difficult to imagine a human-like AI in this domain without some sort of singularity occurring, but no one I talk to thinks that such a thing is near.