Rise of the Machines: AlphaGo’s victory prompts AI academic anxiety

The first thing you need to understand is that Go is a much more complicated game than chess. More than 2500 years old and borne out of classical Chinese antiquity, Go quickly spread through Japan and Korea, and then other parts of East Asia. There are now professional Go players competing for purses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, with each player credited with a ranking, called a Dan, between 1 and 9, not too dissimilar to belts in martial arts.