With his hand pushed firmly into his cheek and his eyes fixed on the table, Garry Kasparov shot a final dark glance at the chessboard before storming out of the room: the king of chess had just been beaten by a computer.
May 11, 1997 was a watershed for the relationship between man and machine, when the artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer Deep Blue finally achieved what developers had been promising for decades. It was an “incredible” moment, AI expert Philippe Rolet said, even if the enduring technological impact was not so huge.
“Deep Blue’s victory made people realize that machines could
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has resulted in unforeseen obstacles and challenges that make victory a near impossibility as casualties continue to mount amid crippling sanctions, according to a letter purportedly authored by a Russian intelligence analyst in one of Moscow's security agencies.
In the first week of January 2020, the United States and Iran were on the brink of war. A week later, Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial began. In a normal year, those two events might have been among the defining moments, but this year, it’s hard to even keep track of them amid the chaos that followed.
Simply put, 2020 was a year of “news hyperinflation.” The U.S. experienced three of the most consequential events in recent history COVID-19, the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and the presidential election in a cascade of overlapping crises.
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Predictably, these three topics dominated Slate’s most popular stories of 2020, as readers sought to make sense of the unprecedented circumstances we all found ourselves in. The stories on this list are prime examples of Slate’s journalistic ethos. They offer a rigorously curious approach to decoding the news, cutting through the noise to explain what really matters.