As a keen player of the board game Go, Mark Griswold was enthralled by the 2016 contest between the world’s top player and a computer — a  milestone in the history of artificial intelligence. He still recalls move 102 in the opening game with awe. The computer, developed by the Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind, placed a white piece in a position that surprised even the experts. 

It turned out to be a stroke of genius that human players would have had trouble planning, and a key moment in a contest that resulted in the victory of machine over man.

People are limited in the range of possibilities they can perceive and analyse, forcing them to think inside “boxes”, he says now. “We humans are innovative — we do get outside our boxes. But we can’t do it at the rate that computers can.”