[stryker]

It's not so surprising if you consider that humans are much better at pattern recognition in general, where the space of possibilities is too large for a brute force search (even with clever optimizations, such as minimax, alpha-beta pruning, and hard-coded openings/endings).

Here is a specific example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)#Computers_and_Go

They've made a bit of progress with Go, putting in heuristics and strategies specific to Go. But it basically amounts to translating human intelligence into code, or what researchers refer to as "domain knowledge".

Surely, machines are orders of magnitude faster than humans, for certain things. Just not all.