And researchers are hailing its latest triumph as yet another landmark moment for computer science, with Carnegie Mellon University's Libratus program cleaning up at a 20-day poker tournament against professional human counterparts.

The Chinese game of Go was considered by many to be the Mt. Everest of artificial intelligence. Where computers mastered simpler games like chess and checkers long ago, Go was a different ball game, with the massive amount of possible positions offered by the grid-patterned board amounting to more atoms than there are in the universe.

Sure, this made developing an algorithm that could consider all the possibilities a huge challenge, but one thing AlphaGo had in its favor was that it could at least see the entire board. In this sense, poker presented another kind of challenge in that it is impossible to know what cards another player is holding, so the program needed to account for and even indulge in misinformation.