How AI Learns to Play Games

Over the past few years, we've seen computer programs winning games which we believe humans were unbeatable. This belief held considering this games had so many possible moves for a given position that would be impossible to computer programs calculate all of then and choose the best ones. However, in 1997 the world witnessed what otherwise was considered impossible: the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer won a six game chess match against Gary Kasparov, the world champion of that time, by 3.5 – 2.5. Such victory would only be achieved again when DeepMind's AlphaGo won a five game Go match against Lee Sedol, 18 times world champion, by a 4-1 score. The IBM Deep Blue team relied mostly in brute force and computation power as their strategy to win the matches.