Artificial intelligence marches on The Japan Times

Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo's overwhelming win over South Korean go grandmaster Lee Sedol in a five-game tournament this month has shown that machine intelligence is rapidly evolving and underlined the possibility that it will catch up with and eventually surpass human intelligence. The time has come for us to think how best to use AI in ways that will contribute to -- and not detract from -- our well-being. In the tournament held in Seoul, the program built by a Google subsidiary DeepMind defeated Lee, a 33-year-old 9-dan professional go player with 18 world titles, in a 4-1 victory. Google had chosen Lee as an opponent in view of his impressive records, considering him as the world's strongest player of the board game. The outcome has stunned go players, professional programmers and the public alike -- given that experts had previously expected it would take more than 10 years for an AI program to beat a world-class professional go player.