Game over? New Artificial Intelligence challenge to human smarts

"AlphaGo is really more interesting than either Deep Blue or Watson, because the algorithms it uses are potentially more general-purpose," said Nick Bostrom of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. Creating "general" or multi-purpose, rather than "narrow", task-specific intelligence, is the ultimate goal in AI -- something resembling human reasoning based on a variety of inputs, and self-learning from experience. "So, if the machine can do new things when needed, then it has'true' intelligence'," Bostrom's colleague Anders Sandberg told AFP. In the case of Go, Google developers realised a more "human-like" approach would win over brute computing power. AlphaGo uses two sets of "deep neural networks" containing millions of connections similar to neurons in the brain.