Teaching Artificial Intelligence to teach itself

In October 2015, when Google invited the European Go champion Fan Hui to play a few games against a computer program called AlphaGo, his response was: "Oh, it's just a program. He lost all five games. A rather jovial fellow, he said his wife told him after the game that he shouldn't check the internet "because people are saying terrible things about you… that a champion has been beaten by a computer". Fan was later hired as an adviser by DeepMind, a Google-owned company that had developed AlphaGo, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program. Six months later, Google asked the world's finest Go player, grandmaster Lee Sedol of South Korea, to a game of five matches. As Lee walked in to play against the machine, he said: "Human intuition is still too advanced for AI to have caught up.