AlphaGo Ushers in a New Era of Digital Transformation

On the morning of March 9th at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, the world changed forever. A computer program called AlphaGo used the relatively new social science of cognitive computing to strategize and beat one of the top masters in the world at the ancient Chinese board game Go. It was hailed as one of the most defining moments in the development of artificial intelligence so far. At NETSCOUT, we watched the development of the AlphaGo program, originally created by British company DeepMind before being acquired by Google in 2014, with great interest. Cognitive computing is something we do every day at NETSCOUT to ensure that our solutions deliver the digital strategies of our clients with maximum efficiency. We like to sometimes compare ourselves to conductors helping to keep the trains of digital networks running on time, and while that is an accurate description of our service assurance platform, it doesn't really dive deeply into the intelligence that our products provide.