Maybe chess isn't practical, but I'm getting a lot of entertainment in following the progress of Leela Chess Zero. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lczero It's right at the critical point where it is essentially equal with the best tree search engine (Stockfish) on high end hardware, and new test results are posted daily in the discord server. Many games are commented on Youtube by Kingscrusher and others.

(And yes I know reality isn't a game with a small finite move set, simple deterministic rules, and perfect information.)