Trends to Watch: Artificial Intelligence

In case you haven't heard, an AI algorithm created by Google's DeepMind group, recently concluded a series of Go matches against the 18-time Go world champion Lee Sedol and won….decisively. First off, the algorithm was not created to actually play the game (e.g Jeopardy or chess). Instead, it used neural networks to build a program that learned how to play Go by itself. The AlphaGo program studied datasets of hundreds of thousands of matches and then proceeded to play against itself millions of times. With each match, the program adjusted its move prediction and position evaluation neural nets, effectively reprogramming, and then competed against this new version of itself to confirm the new versions superiority.