In May 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue Supercomputer won a fascinating match with the reigning World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov. In January 2011, IBM’s Watson handily defeated the two Jeopardy champions during a demonstration round. In February, Watson will compete against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter over three nights. This is another progress in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) toward the ultimate test, the Turing test. According to the Turing test, a machine is considered intelligent if a person that chat with a human and a machine cannot define who is who. To achieve it, the machine needs to understand natural language including nuances. This is the challenge that Watson needs to handle as part of the Jeopardy game, and it has to do it fast.
In a different research lab at IBM, researchers developed an automated agent (or intelligent program) that can perform trading in a model similar to the stock exchange market. As shown in that research, the agents outperformed the humans and showed higher profits. While each of those examples enabled machines to be more intelligent, we are still far away from a human intelligent robot.