Artificial Intelligence Helps Find New Drugs: Better, Faster, Cheaper

In 1997 a remarkable event caught everybody's attention - the then champion of the world Garry Kasparov lost a tournament to a supercomputer Deep Blue. It was called "a beginning of a new era of computers" by many and now it seems that time keeps justifying those loud statements... Being a sub-set of artificial intelligence, machine learning involves algorithms allowing computers to autonomously learn from input data. A fundamental distinction from "usual" software programs, such as Photoshop or, say, Excel, is that in machine learning computers don't have to be explicitly programmed but can change and improve their algorithms by themselves. The history of machine learning goes back to the 1950th. The first learning program was created by Arthur Samuel in 1952 and it was the game of checkers.