Google’s AI beats Go champion, will now take on best player in the world

Computers have already beaten the best humans at Checkers, Chess, and Jeopardy, but mastery of the ancient Chinese game Go has eluded computer scientists for the longest time. Deepmind, Google's artificial intelligence division, claims to have made a big breakthrough using neural networks, and it recently took on and defeated a Go world champion.

As Google's blog post puts it, "There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible positions" in Go, which makes the game very complex. Mapping out every possible move won't work for Go, making it the one game computers can't beat humans at. Performing well at Go is considered by some to be a benchmark for artificial intelligence.

Deepmind's AI, called "AlphaGo," recently took on reigning three-time European Go champion Fan Hui and won all five games. In March, AlphaGo has a throw-down scheduled with Lee Sedol, who has been the top Go player in the world for the past decade.

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