Matching wits

While AlphaGo's win over one of the world's best Go players marked a milestone in artificial intelligence advances, humans have an edge in many of the simpler tasks, such as linguistic expression.

What does a board game have in common with a pet?

It turns out that Go as a game sounds like the Chinese word for dog (gou) even though the Chinese equivalent is weiqi, or literally the encircling game. That's why for the past week many in China have been inundated by the news that a dog has trumped humans in smartness. It was about the only scintilla of fun in an otherwise grim scenario for the human species.