In the 2022 Australian Open tennis tournament, Rafael Nadal and
Daniil Medvedev battled it out at the men's finals. At one
point in the match, the score read 6-2, 7-6, 3-2 and 40-0 in favor
of Medvedev and an artificial intelligence (AI) model predicted he
had a 96% chance of victory.
At that stage of the match, such a prediction did not seem
unreasonable. Nadal had recently recovered from COVID and surgery,
and Medvedev was overwhelmingly in the lead. But in a surprise
finish, Nadal then won the third, fourth and fifth sets, eventually
winning his second Australian Open and 21st Grand Slam title.
While some commentators lauded the victory of humans over AI, it
was not so much a failure of AI as an illustration of its inherent
limitations. AI simulates human intelligence and problem-solving
capabilities – and most humans likely would, on the basis of
the available evidence at that moment in time, have predicted a
Medvedev victory. AI works by applying logic and
