Quantum computing: the power to think outside the box

By Richard Waters,John Thornhill  in San Francisco, in London

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.