How does a computer play chess?  This website, http://www.bewitched.com/chess/, shows the moves that the computer is exploring before deciding on its move.  Basically it is trying many moves ahead, putting a score on each move, and choosing the best move.  In general, given two computers playing against each other, the one which can look one move further ahead will win more than it loses (assuming that the scoring system is relatively equal).  Knowledge of chess shows in the scoring algorithm.  Give it a try!

Robot-assisted surgery exists and will likely increase. This http://spectrum.ieee.org/ video looks like a compilation of ads, but it is still interesting.  Note that medical software isn't without risks -- see the classic Therac-25 case (https://en.wikipedia.org).

A VISA ring instead of a card will be tested at the Rio Olympics: http://www.engadget.com/. Unfortunately, technical details are missing from this article except for this comment which does not make one comfortable: "It doesn't exchange as much data as Apple Pay or Android Pay, but it's on par with swiping your card."  Convenience at the expense of security.

Over the years there have been a variety of attacks speculated for malicious hardware including one that manipulates the random number generator to break encryption.  Here is a particularly insidious one because of the tiny change (add a capacitor) and a demonstration of the backdoor that is created.  The paper appears in the IEEE Symposium on Privacy and Security, but this https://www.wired.com/ article provides a brief description.

Mario Brothers is hard -- in a computational sense.  That is, figuring out the optimal strategy is hard (according to research at MIT).  Better understanding where a game fits in computational theory puts us closer to understanding how computationally hard real life is.  These are questions probed in a computational theory course (such as CSE 460 at MSU).

Autonomous vehicles are currently outsourcing their hardware to the same company: Mobileye.  Here is a great article on the underlying hardware: xhttp://wccftech.com/

Apologies for a post related to politics, but this sysadmin view of the Clinton email mess explains it better than any political posting I've seen.  It describes the "entitled executive," a creature that exists in the corporate word.  Hillary fits: http://arstechnica.com/