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
The Deep Blue Good-by time, we see the American culture change, from the Kennedy years in "The Deep Blue Good-bye" through the upheaval of hippie counterculture and the sexual revolution of the late 60s and 70s until the last book in the series at the end of the Reagan years in the mid-80s. As a chronicler of the cultural zeitgeist, MacDonald has been compared favorably with Charles Dickens. Reading the McGee novels in sequence therefore gives the reader a fascinating experience of seeing McGee change through the decades as American culture also changes. When MacDonald created the character, he was to be called Dallas