Google's AlphaGo Trounces Humans--But It Also Gives Them a Boost

The day Thore Graepel joined Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence lab in the spring of 2015, his new colleagues sat him down for a game of Go. Over the previous year, they'd trained a neural network to play the ancient game. Graepel happened to be a player himself, holding a one dan rank, the Go equivalent of a black belt. As the game began with DeepMind researchers circled around him, Graepel was confident he would win. After all, he never had trouble playing other Go programs.