Artificial Intelligence had been able to beat the best Chess players more than 10 years ago. As you probably already knew, the super computer Deep Blue beated Kasparov in 1996. With Moore's law working for so many years later on, computers have become way more advanced now. However, there is still one territory where programs have not been able to beat human intelligence, and it is not even close. This is GO - the ancient and mysterious Chinese board game.

A lot of people have been working on GO programs for more than 20 years. However they are all quite weak till now. Usually a human with average IQ can beat the best computer GO program after learning to play GO for a year. The reason is simply because GO is too complicated. The rule of GO is quite simple actually. Two players using black and white stones play on a board with 19x19 intersections. Each stone has to be placed on an intersection. If one stone or a group of stone is totally surrounded by the other players' stones, the surrounded stones are "dead" and have to be removed from the board. In the end the player who takes more space of the board wins.
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The rule is simple. But the possibility of each move is already a lot, the possibility of a few moves would be immense. Some computer expert estimated that it would take Deep Blue a year and a half to think 7 moves ahead! This is why GO programs are still so weak.
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What is amazing is, being the most complicated game, GO is also probably the most ancient game in the world. Archeology showed that there had been a lot of GO activities in China around 600 B.C. Since then, Go played an important role in Chinese traditional arts. The old sayings of China listed Go as one of the four major arts with music, painting and caligraphy. During the prosperous Tang Dynasty(唐朝), Japanese and Korean learned GO from Chinese. It became also very popular in Japan and Korea.
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The popularity of GO lasted well. Today, there are still a lot of people playing GO regularly in Japan, Korea and China. A rough estimation is that the GO population is about 10 million in China, 3 million in Japan and 9 million in Korea. There are several international GO competitions being held almost every year. The prize for the champions can be as high as 400 thousand US dollors, such as the Samsung Cup. But the prize is not the only impetus for those professional GO players who devoted their whole lives to GO. Seeking for new heights of their skill is usually the more important impetus as there really is no limit to the height of the skill due to the vast variability of the game.