Five Lessons from AlphaGo's Historic Victory

AlphaGo handily beat 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol 4-1, and in doing so taught us several interesting lessons about where AI research is today, and where it is headed. One fascinating thing about AlphaGo is the unusual way it was designed. The software combined deep learning--the hottest AI technique out there today--with a much older, and far less fashionable, approach. Deep learning involves using very large simulated neural networks, and usually it eschews logic or symbol manipulation of the kind pioneered by the likes of Marvin Minksy and John McCarthy. But AlphaGo combines deep learning with something called tree-search, a technique invented by one of Minksy's contemporaries and colleagues, Claude Shannon.