In 1989, more than a quarter of a century before the world watched the Go-playing supercomputer AlphaGo vanquish the world champion Lee Sedol, a computer notched up a different milestone in artificial intelligence that was all but unnoticed. This was largely because the evidence was too crude to publish.
Just after lunchtime on May 2, someone at Drake University in Iowa — presumably a male student — started an online text chat with a user at University College Dublin. The UCD user’s handle was “MGonz”.
