Artificial Intelligence (AI) could help address issues in various fields ranging from education to healthcare, said Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of the Data Group, Microsoft's leading database.

Earlier this year Google revealed AlphaGo Zero, a machine-learning system that in a short space of time was able to become a world master at the notoriously complex game of Go. AlphaGo Zero played "completely random" games against itself, and then learnt from the results. In just three days it was able to defeat by 100 games to 0 the version of AlphaGo that defeated the Go world champion Lee Se-dol in March 2016, a victory hailed as a milestone for AI development. After 21 days of playing itself it had gone even further, besting AlphaGo Master -- an online version of AlphaGo that won more than 60 straight games against top Go players, and within 40 days was able to beat all other versions of AlphaGo. At the time, DeepMind lead researcher David Silver said that achieving this level of performance in a domain as complicated as Go "should mean that we can now start to tackle some of the most challenging and impactful problems for humanity".

Like cortical response properties, the connectivitypattern is highly plastic in early developmentand can be altered by experience (Katz and Callaway 1992).