Last week, Google's AlphaGo program took on the world's second-ranked Go player, Lee Sedol, winning four out of five games and becoming the world's second highest rated Go player in the process. AlphaGo's success has been noted as an important milestone in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) because Go is a vastly more complex game than chess. But equally important was Google's revelation that one of its robots has developed the ability to pick up objects in ways that had previously only been identified in cognitive life forms — for example, moving obstructions out of the way. Both advances were brought about by continued research and development in computational models based on the human central nervous system, which is particularly well suited to certain aspects of AI, such as pattern recognition and machine and adaptive learning.