AlphaGo is No. 1 Go player, marking AI's power over human mind

Humanity's contest with artificial intelligence, using the oldest and most complicated form of competition known to the human mind, came down convincingly in the machine's favour this week, firmly marking a point in time when the progeny of the human race outsmarted the creator's own ingenuity. AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence (AI) programme developed in 2014 by the DeepMind lab of the world's largest internet search engine Google, vanquished China's Ke Jie, the top player of the game of Go in all three matches this week in Wuzhen in Zhejiang province. The game of Go, also known as weiqi (圍棋), is played on a 19 X 19 grid board by two players. With more permutations and possible moves than the total number of estimated atoms in the visible universe, it has been used as the benchmark for measuring human intelligence against the artificial variety. Computer scientists and futurists had predicted that AI would need at least a decade before it can beat humans at Go. AlphaGo's 3-0 victories this week have brought forward that timeline significantly.