Cognitive computing: The human touch

In 1809, Napoleon intentionally made an illegal move three times during a chess game. His opponent, a machine known as the Mechanical Turk, then swept all the pieces from the board. Amused, Napoleon sat down and played a real game - and lost in 19 moves. Considered a wonder, the Mechanical Turk proved to be an illusion controlled by a human chess master. The desire to create artificial intelligence clearly has a long history. It was not until 1997, however, that the world saw how artificial intelligence could outsmart a human. IBM Deep Blue, a chess-playing machine, defeated reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in six games.

The Jeopardy! victory of Watson over two human champions 14 years later was another breakthrough. Until then, it was said that machines were good at doing what humans were bad at. Computers were faster at calculating and processing, but a disappointment at understanding natural language or recognizing unique objects in an image. Watson's victory showed that machines could now do what humans are good at. Watson, which can process information equivalent to a million books per second, solved cryptically worded questions, revealing an ability to understand natural language. The milestones have continued to fall ever since.

This year, Google's AlphaGo triumphed 3-0 over the world champion of Go, China's ancient abstract strategy game. 'During those games, AlphaGo made a completely new, and thus, creative move which had never been made by a human player before and which the system had not been trained on,' says Daniela Schneider, the Allianz Group expert for text-related artificial intelligence.

She asserts that the AlphaGo victory is significant because of the complexity of the game. Played on a 19x19 grid, Go has more possible configurations than atoms in the universe. 'We are seeing a future where computers are beginning to solve problems in entirely new ways. Until now, creativity has been considered an innately human domain,' says Schneider.