So even though companies like IBM are working on so-called cognitive computers that would mimic human learning and reasoning, there is no chance we will see autonomous drones that can survive the rigors of aerial combat anytime soon.
It is "things" that make us smart, the cognitive artifacts that allow human beings to overcome the limitations of human memory and conscious reasoning.
Since there might be more than one logically consistent solution to a problem, the idea would be to enable a computer to arrive at the same truth value that a human would, by reasoning in a similar fashion.
It was an astonishing triumph of human visual-spatial reasoning, and one of the first major scientific advances to come from playing a video game (though plenty of software engineers I know would argue that video games activate much more creativity than we care to acknowledge).