The sole quote responsible for the reworded title is:<p>''It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go -- maybe even longer,'' said Dr. Piet Hut, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and a fan of the game. ''If a reasonably intelligent person learned to play Go, in a few months he could beat all existing computer programs. You don't have to be a Kasparov.''
Predictions seem to be consistently wrong, or at least random. We don't have flying cars. My mother was told in the 30's that there would be movies in the home in 80's. She really hoped her eyesight would be good enough to see the TV at that age.<p>I think if anyone would actually be good at predictions they could somehow take advantage of that. Maybe in the stock market?
Not sure if Tezhi Luzhanqi or L'attaque (1910) qualify as ancient games, but let me play a heuristically tuned AlphaStratego mesosphere and I'll beat it 5-0, now and for the next 5 years at least! Jack6/Shark bridge AI doesn't consistently beat the top human pairs yet.
Then there are Connect6 and Emergo.
At the same time there were predictions that computers would have more processing power than humans within 1 or 2 decades.<p>Those two things obviously don't go together.