Can a Computer Be an Inventor?

On March 15, DeepMind's AlphaGo, a computer powered by a self-learning artificial intelligence computer program, defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol. As the AI community celebrates this major milestone in making machines smart, the debate of "man vs. machine" is heating up. Over the past 25 years -- especially the last five years -- the AI community has transformed theoretical machine learning constructs to solve useful problems. AI techniques such as self-learning, reinforcement learning, and deep neural networks were developed to recognize traffic signs and classify images. The recent rapid progress in AI was powered by the dramatic increase in financial investments in AI.