Surprise! Google's AI neural network has been secretly beating the world's top Go players in online matches

Chinese social media is currently alight with the news that some of the country's top Go players have been beaten multiple times, not by a human, but by a robot, which has now been revealed to be a software program called AlphaGo run on Google's deep learning neural network DeepMind. In March 2016, DeepMind made international news when the AlphaGo program succeeded in beating the Go world champion player Lee Sedo, 33, from South Korea by 4-1. DeepMind is a neural network – essentially a large web of artificially intelligent classical computers that are trained using computer algorithms to solve complex problems in a similar way to the human central nervous system. The computers are separated into different groups known as'layers' to examine different parts of the problem, and each layer's answer is then combined to produce a final answer. Go is an ancient Chinese abstract strategy game that originated over 2,500 years ago and is considered to be more complex than chess.