Go and Artificial Intelligence

I came across this really interesting article about a program designed to beat computers at the Chinese game Go here. This breakthrough is reminiscent of IBM’s Deep Blue in the 1990’s, beating chess champion Gary Kasparov in a test of man vs computer.

Go is significantly harder for a computer to solve than chess, with approximately 10¹⁷⁰ board configurations.

The program utilizes deep neural networks to determine the best possible move from a given position. After learning from millions of expert games, the program played against itself, learning to improve along the way.

This is pretty big for Google (who designed the program), machine learning, and technology in general. Read more about it here.