Machines that learn: The origin story of artificial intelligence

Lee Sedol, a world champion in the Chinese strategy board game Go, faced a new kind of adversary at a 2016 match in Seoul. Developers at DeepMind, an artificial intelligence startup acquired by Google, had fed 30 million Go moves into a deep neural network. Their creation, dubbed AlphaGo, then figured out which moves worked by playing millions of games against itself, learning at a faster rate than any human ever could. The match, which AlphaGo won 4 to 1, "was the moment when the new movement in artificial intelligence exploded into the public consciousness," technology journalist Cade Metz writes in his engaging new book, "Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World." Metz, who covers AI for The New York Times and previously wrote for Wired magazine, is well positioned to chart the decades-long effort to build artificially intelligent machines.