The game Russell Crowe plays in A Beautiful Mind is GO, the oldest board game in the world. An ancient game of strategy originated in China some 4,000 years ago, its rules have survived millennia practically unchanged. To date it is still played by millions. GO is a supreme tactical challenge known on occasion to drive people mad. Yet for centuries, its intricacies of capturing and defending territory were taught to the samurais of Japan in order to prepare their minds for a life of confrontation and battle. The winner of the yearly tournament was allowed a seat in the government among the shoguns.

One can learn to play GO in an afternoon, but it takes a lifetime to master. One starts with an empty board, a nineteen-line grid with 361 points. The stones are black and white, all alike and equal in value, and the opponents take turns placing their stones on the intersections.

To play GO one needs single-minded focus, with time to study, and even more to play. As experience is gained and knowledge grows, one learns to take every detail of the board into account—"to think underneath the stones"—as one of GO's many proverbs proclaims. Many more abilities become natural: to trust intuition, to recognize the patterns; thrive on changes; take the initiative; anticipate, plan, think ahead; evolve strategies; veil and unveil moves; make life-and-death decisions. To be patient and coexist with your opponent (with just a little bit more of the territory in your possession), guided by the intention to always make the best move at exactly the right time.

So far, the computer can't beat a human at GO, at least not those who have played it for longer than a month. Intuition, pattern recognition and strategy are among the attributes of human intelligence that the computer cannot stand up to yet (if ever). For example, IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue would ponder over a single move for three minutes, calculating a mind-numbing 200 million chess positions per second in its epic victory over World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The same depth of move would take Deep Blue 1.5 years to mull over in a match up with GO, and then it most likely would still make the wrong move. "GO may be," as one journalist from the Dallas Morning News writes, "the last refuge of human intelligence." Or, at least, as one programmer claims, "the Holy Grail of computer programming" and "the biggest challenge in computer science."

To think that by merely using the brute force of computer processing power to overcome the subtleties and complexities of GO, one automatically assumes the human brain can calculate trillions of moves per second to remain superior to the computer. No one really believes that humans are able to do this. We must be using a shortcut, an immediate path to direct knowledge giving a quick, clear and full apprehension of a complex group of data. We do: It is called intuition. It is intuition that gives the GO player the flashes of insight to "just know" the best move to make.

Throughout history intuition has proven a major source of inspiration leading to innovation. In Awakening Intuition, author Frances E. Vaughan explains this process: "Time after time it appears that major human achievements involve intuitive leaps of imagination. It is the intuitive, pattern-reception faculties associated with the right hemisphere of the brain that break through existing formulations of the truth and expand the body of knowledge. The stabilization of intuitive insights, and their usefulness to humanity, are subsequently determined by careful, logical examination and validation, but the original vision or insight is intuitive."

Carl Jung described intuition as "one of the four ways human beings process the world," placing intuition as "the function by which one can see around corners." Albert Einstein is famous for saying "There is only the way of intuition," considering it the most important aspect of his talent, crediting intuition as "the free invention of the imagination." Virologist Jonas Salk, who discovered the polio vaccine, said, "Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next."

The most relevant research into intuition was done by 1978 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics Herbert Simon, a founding father of Artificial Intelligence. Located at an intersection of the fields of economics, psychology, computer science and organization theory, the central question underlying all of Simon's research was, How do people solve problems and make decisions? Simon's work was motivated by the belief that neither the human mind, human thinking and decision making, nor human creativity need to be mysterious. His life work was devoted to proving this point. His motto was "Wonderful, but not incomprehensible."

By creating "thinking" machines, Simon learned there was nothing magical or mystical about intuition, and came to understand it as a process of subconscious pattern recognition, based on experiences and knowledge stored in memory that are retrieved when needed. He wrote, "Intuition is not a process that operates independently from analysis; rather the two processes are essentially complementary components of effective decision-making systems." He went so far as stating that intuition is analytical thinking, yet it happens so fast, one is not aware that it is an integral part of human information processing. To Simon it is through experience that "orderly sequential analysis" is bypassed, and understanding is enhanced to allow for people to make decisions intuitively. Therefore, according to Simon, intuition is a skill of the expert recognizing a "chunk," or pattern of information, be it a baby instantly recognizing its mother; an Einstein grasping the theory of relativity after an intense ten years of study; or a computer being intelligent.

As far back as 1958, Simon was the first to write a computer chess program, which—unlike Deep Blue—did not use brute force, but was modeled on the highly selective characteristics of a human brain searching. It was Simon's point of view that every human activity considered to be intelligent can also be done by a computer. After Simon's death in 2001, Raj Reddy, a Herbert A. Simon university professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, remarked, "Herb leaves us, his disciples, with an unfinished revolution and a number of unsolved problems." What might greatly benefit the field of Artificial Intelligence—and quite possibly lead to paradigm-shifting breakthroughs—is if Reddy and his fellow scientists would redirect a significant amount of their time and research dollars into developing computer GO software, "the last refuge of human intelligence."