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An artificial intelligence computer program created by Google has beaten the European champion of the board game Go, a “watershed moment” for AI.
As the video suggests, Go is a much more complex game than chess, which has previously been used as a measuring stick for artificial intelligence programs, and uses more intuition than logic as part of gameplay, arguably making it harder to program for.
This makes the result, a 5-0 win over European champion Fan Hui, all the more significant for the program, known as AlphaGo.
Demis Hassabis, from Google’s DeepMind, who built the program said: “We are thrilled to have mastered Go and thus achieved one of the grand challenges of AI.
“However, the most significant aspect of all this for us is that AlphaGo isn’t just an ‘expert’ system built with hand-crafted rules; instead it uses general machine learning techniques to figure out for itself how to win at Go.
“While games are the perfect platform for developing and testing AI algorithms quickly and efficiently, ultimately we want to apply these techniques to important real-world problems.
“Because the methods we’ve used are general-purpose, our hope is that one day they could be extended to help us address some of society’s toughest and most pressing problems, from climate modelling to complex disease analysis. We’re excited to see what we can use this technology to tackle next.”
In the immediate future is a match against world champion Lee Sedol, in Seoul. No pressure.
