Deep Learning Demystified - The New Stack

This year has been a good one for robots in the epic battle of Man vs. Machine. It's been decades since the first computer beat a chess champion, but the ancient Chinese game of Go -- which supposedly has more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe -- had always escaped the robot's grasp. At least until Google's AlphaGo took four out of five games against the reigning human world champion. Well, basically it taught itself. Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence subsidiary spent the last two years developing this database of 100,000 human-played rounds of Go which it fed into AlphaGo which then played against itself millions of times, using machine learning and neural networks to improve until it was finally the victor. But then when you take that machine learning and artificial intelligence to the next level of deep learning, well, your neurons take a hit.