Deep Learning, Pachinko, and James Watt: Efficiency is the Driver of Uncertainty

It seems it may only be a matter of time before the best Go player on the planet is a computer. AlphaGo beat the European champion in Go and was driven by machine learning, a technology that has underpinned the recent major advances in artificial intelligence in computer vision, speech recognition and language translation.1 Machine learning is a data driven approach to artificial intelligence. AlphaGo learnt how to play Go by many games played against itself, and by observing a large history of games played by professional players. The end result is that by the time of its first match against the European Champion AlphaGo had already played many more games of Go than any human could possibly play in their lifetime. And since that win AlphaGo has been actively learning to improve itself. Relentlessly playing all day and all night in an effort to ready itself to play the world champion.