Facebook's Go-playing AI is a free download

Much as IBM's Watson once demonstrated the power of AI by becoming a Jeopardy champion, DeepMind's AlphaGo has been beating the world's best Go players, a long-time aspiration of AI researchers which once seemed unobtainable. Here at the F8 conference, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer lavished praise on DeepMind (a division of Google) for its accomplishment--and then began talking about ELF OpenGo, Facebook's own reimplementation of DeepMind's technology. Though he readily admitted that Facebook's version isn't the world's best Go-playing technology, it recently took on four top-30 human Go players--running on a computer with a single GPU powering its computations--and won 14-0.