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GO SPOTTING: Discover Magazine on “Who’s Smarter, a Human or a Computer?”

“Go computers are not even close to human capability,” reported Andrew Moseman last February in Discover Magazine . In “Who's Smarter, a Human or a Computer?” Moseman reviews “the ways that humans can still out-think our computational creations—for now.” On the eve of the IBM's supercomputer thumping of Jeopardy champions, Moseman looked at checkers, chess, poker and go, as well as Scrabble and Risk, which are also games where humans still do better than computer programs. "There won't be any major popular game solved for a while now," University of Alberta professor Jonathan Schaeffer -- a member of a research team that created a poker-playing AI that can best human players in limit Texas hold 'em -- says. "There's a gap." photo: Watson faces its human rivals in a practice round. Image: Jeopardy / IBM