go

Back when I was in high school, I remember our computer studies teacher telling us that a computer only does what it’s told to do, and so mistakes are not the machine’s, but rather the user’s. With neural networks and machine learning, that is no longer true. AlphaGo, DeepMind’s specialist Go-playing machine, has proved as much. AlphaGo has been programmed to learn from its mistakes, and can err all on its own.

The AI-powered system failed to recover from an error against Lee Sedol in their fourth game, and eventually lost. In the fifth game, however, it made a mistake and was able to win the series in seemingly dramatic fashion.

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Google’s AI system AlphaGo, part of its DeepMind project, has again beaten world champion Lee Sedol – and looks like it may be on track to take the title in the next game. Engadget reports Sedol saying that he was left speechless by his defeat.

“I’m quite speechless,” said Lee in the post-match conference. “It was a clear loss on my part. From the beginning there was no moment I thought I was leading.”

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis tweeted that AlphaGo “played some beautiful creative moves in this game” …

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In 2014, Google bought UK startup DeepMind, considered to be the premier lab working on artificial intelligence. Today, head Demis Hassabis announced that they built an AI that can beat a human being at the ancient Chinese game of Go. The game is widely considered to be a benchmark for an AI’s ability to think.

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