Google's AlphaGo Levels Up From Board Games to Power Grids

When researchers inside Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence lab first built AlphaGo--the machine that plays the ancient game of Go better than any human--they needed human help. The machine learned to play this exceedingly complex game by analyzing about 300 million moves by professional Go players. Then, once AlphaGo could mimic human play, it reached an even higher level by playing game after game against itself, closely tracking the results of each move. In the end, the machine was good enough to beat the Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, the best player of the last decade. But then, about a year ago, DeepMind redesigned the system.