The Unexpected Humanity of Robot Soccer - Issue 39: Sport

When Google's AlphaGo computer program triumphed over a Go expert earlier this year, a human member of the Google team had to physically move the pieces. Manuela Veloso, the head of Carnegie Mellon's machine learning department, would have done it differently. "I'd require the machine to move the pieces like I do," she says. "That's the world in which I live, which is a physical world." If Google can make cars that drive themselves, surely it could add robotic arms to a Go match. Even in 1997, I.B.M. could have given Deep Blue robotic arms in its match against Garry Kasparov.