Progress in artificial intelligence telephone banking, and 11 years for expert songwriting, but over 30 years for writing a New York Times bestseller or winning the Putnam math competition. An AI defeated a grandmaster in a regulation tournament game for the first time in 1988; rebranded as Deep Blue, it beat the reigning human world chess champion in 1997. AlphaGo defeated a European Go champion in October 2015, and defeated one of the world's top players, Lee Sedol, in March 2016. According to Scientific American and other sources, most observers had expected superhuman Computer Go performance to be at least a decade away. AI
What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World Boston Globe" described the album as one of the band's "most enjoyable and lively efforts in recent memory", "The New York Times" noted that "What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World" "strikes a note of pop concision and maturity, building on what worked on ‘The King Is Dead.’ Lyrically, there are fewer thistles and minarets and palanquins—and, musically, less digressive excess—than once made up the Decemberists’ trademark style." Jeremy Larson of Pitchfork Media was a detractor, bemoaning the album as "overlong and under-ambitious", though appreciating that listeners "start to see Meloy himself more than ever". Larson also wrote highly