Chess has been played for around 1,500 years, but once computers began to play, humans didn’t stand a chance. US tech company IBM’s Deep Blue computer first beat Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, and the game hasn’t been the same since. In 2017, UK AI research company DeepMind created AlphaZero, a program that taught itself from scratch (从头开始) to master chess, shogi (Japanese chess) and Go, beating the world champion in each game.