Forget AlphaGo, DeepMind has a more interesting step toward general AI

AlphaGo and self-driving cars are amazingly clever, but neither represents a very big leap toward general artificial intelligence. Fortunately, some AI researchers are developing ways of broadening machine intelligence. The researchers at DeepMind, which created the champion Go-playing robot AlphaGo, are working on an approach that could prove significant in the quest to make machines as intelligent as we are. In two papers published this week and reported by New Scientist, researchers at the Alphabet subsidiary describe efforts to teach computers about relational reasoning, a cognitive capability that is foundational to human intelligence. Simply put, relational reasoning is the ability to consider relationships between different mental representations, such as objects, words, or ideas.