The world of gaming is being rocked by an AI controversy that could upend the multi-billion dollar industry. Researchers have created an artificial intelligence tool that is capable of tracing wines back to their origins, using a chemical analysis that can warn consumers of potential fraudsters. "There's a lot of wine fraud around with people making up some crap in their garage, printing off labels, and selling it for thousands of dollars," University of Geneva Professor Alexandre Pouget, one of the researchers behind the project, said, according to a report in the Guardian. "We show for the first time that we have enough sensitivity with our chemical techniques to tell the difference." Fake wines are a widespread problem, the report noted, with fraudsters typically whipping up a batch as close to a well-known brand as possible and slapping a fake label on the bottle.

Wines really are given a distinct identity by the place where their grapes are grown and the wine is made, according to an analysis of red Bordeaux wines. Alexandre Pouget at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and his colleagues used machine learning to analyse the chemical composition of 80 red wines from 12 years between 1990 and 2007. All the wines came from seven wine estates in the Bordeaux region of France. "We were interested in finding out whether there is a chemical signature that is specific to each of those chateaux that's independent of vintage," says Pouget, meaning one estate's wines would have a very similar chemical profile, and therefore taste, year after year. To do this, Pouget and his colleagues used a machine to vaporise each wine and separate it into its chemical components.

Fraudsters who pass off ropey plonk as a high-end tipple may soon have artificial intelligence on their case; scientists have trained an algorithm to trace wines to their origins based on routine chemical analyses. Researchers used machine learning to distinguish wines based on subtle differences in the concentrations of scores of compounds, allowing them to track the wines back not only to a particular vine-growing region, but to the estate where the wine was made. "There's a lot of wine fraud around with people making up some crap in their garage, printing off labels, and selling it for thousands of dollars," said Prof Alexandre Pouget at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. "We show for the first time that we have enough sensitivity with our chemical techniques to tell the difference." To train the program, the scientists turned to gas chromatography, which had been used to analyse 80 wines harvested over 12 years from seven different estates in the Bordeaux region of France.