I was reading something the other day about artificial intelligence, which was all rather refreshing for me given that I’ve lived a bumbling, fumbling life of natural nincompoopery. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to the end of the said article as my doddering incompetence led to me dunting my cup-a-soup over the magazine, thus rendering the page as unreadable as the Tuesday column.

Technology has always bamboozled this correspondent. I mean, if computers are so clever, why is it that when you want to shut your laptop down you have to click on start? That’s just ridiculous. For a dyed-in-the-wool Luddite like myself, the mouth-frothing, whooping, queuing-round-the-block hysteria that is generated by the introduction of the latest gee-whiz gadget is as eye-wateringly awful as an outbreak of the norovirus on a Lochs & Glens bus tour.

These are constantly evolving times, of course, and in the world of golf, the turnover of players from the amateur game to the professional ranks churns away like an industrial conveyor belt rolling out some hi-tech battalion of robots.

The blurring of the amateur and pro boundaries continues and the golfing carrots that get dangled in front of young hopefuls become ever more abundant. This season’s European Challenge Tour, which got underway in Kenya at the weekend, has become another of those enticing, dangly things with the new development that sees players from the unpaid game included on the second-tier circuit’s rankings. In an effort to help ease the tricky transition for some of the leading lights from the amateur ranks, invited players, who contest a minimum of four tournaments in 2016 and pay a membership fee, will be given a ranking from which they are entitled to earn a full category the following season providing they turn professional thereafter.

Romain Langasque, who won the Amateur Championship at Carnoustie last summer, showed just what can be achieved as he finished second in the Barclays Kenyan Open on Sunday. He is set to turn professional after taking up his invitation to next month’s Masters and can resume where he left off on the Challenge Tour and continue adding to the ranking points he has already racked up from his amateur dramatics in the season-opener.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that Langasque will come back to the cut-and-thrust of European golf’s second division as a pro and make the kind of impact he did at the weekend. Playing for your livelihood, where every euro, pound or dollar is a prisoner, is an entirely different proposition to playing with nothing to lose and everything to gain as an amateur but the Frenchman has certainly shown that he has what it takes to compete at that level. Securing a platform upon which they can ply their trade is of the utmost importance for any amateur making the pro plunge. Far too many turn professional almost for the sheer hell of it, picking up bits here and pieces there without any real structured schedule or direction and as a result they are left muddling about in a no-man’s land. This Challenge Tour initiative is certainly appealing in an era when the majority of the top young amateurs are simply itching to become touring professionals. The mass migration to the paid game, however, is almost unsustainable and as the former GB&I Walker Cup captain, Nigel Edwards, says, “there’s just not enough room out there for everybody to be a successful tour pro.” Those who are not up to the standards are very quickly found out in the kind of dog-eat-dog environment that would make jungle warfare look like a fun run round Pollok Park and only the talented and the mentally tough survive. Any opportunity amateurs with professional ambitions can get to gauge where their game is and what level they need to reach before making an informed, well-timed leap can only be beneficial.

The trio of Ewen Ferguson, Grant Forrest and Jack McDonald, the three Scots who helped GB&I win last year’s Walker Cup, as well as Australian Amateur winner Connor Syme and Craig Ross, the new South African Amateur champion, will no doubt be among those afforded Challenge Tour opportunities over the coming months. Usually, they would have to go through the qualifying school or earn promotion from a third-tier satellite tour to acquire a Challenge Tour ranking so they will be looking at this latest development as a free shot to make inroads. In this game, you have to seize the chances when they come along. At a time when Scotland doesn’t have a male golfer on the main European Tour under the age of 30, the incentive being offered by the second-tier circuit is an opportunity to see if the new wave are, well, up for the challenge.