Computer Defeats Japan's Top-Ranked Human Shogi Player

Computers have been beating humans at games for a while now. Remember IBM's Deep Blue, which beat chess champ Gary Kasparov way back in 1997? More recently, IBM developed a supercomputer that could defeat a human at 'Jeopardy.' Despite these advances, computers haven't overthrown the human race -- yet.

But, according to The Mainichi Daily News a computer dubbed Akara 2010 recently defeated Japan's top female player at shogi -- a Japanese game similar to chess. It took Akara, whose name is taken from a Buddhist term representing the number of unique shogi games possible (for the record, 10,224), a full six hours and 86 moves to defeat Ichiyo Shimizu during the game, which was played at the University of Tokyo. Shimizu told the Daily News that the computer didn't pull any surprising moves (or, we assume, talk smack). "It made no eccentric moves, and from partway through it felt like I was playing against a human," she said.

[Source]