Cédric Villani: Which will win out – robots or human beings?

Which will win out – robots or human beings? This is a highly topical question. The South Koreans, and many more millions of curious people worldwide, became obsessed with this issue when a match was played between a professional Go player named Lee Se-Dol, and AlphaGo, a computer programme developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind. The match resulted in a 4-1 victory for the machine over the Korean star player. Given that Go was one of the last bastions of the games world to hold out against the learning and analysis techniques employed by cutting-edge computers, this defeat basically symbolises the considerable progress made by deep learning.