It appears that the days of our friendly (relatively?) neighborhood androids are drawing ever nearer. As the technology of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been developed, the world has seen the masters of a myriad of games fall to these underdogs (undercomputers?). According to Google’s blog, the first loss of humanity against a computer was a tic-tac-toe game as far back as 1952. Checkers and chess both fell in the nineties, and then IBM’s supercomputer beat two champions in a game of jeopardy. As AI technology has advanced, so have the games they are able to not only play, but win. Just this October, Google’s DeepMind AI beat the European Go Champion in five rounds, and the AI is up against the world master this month. It’s already defeated the top player twice in a row, with a third match-up coming in just a few days.
This is a major victory for those working in the field of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a technology that is advancing much faster than even experts have anticipated. According to the BBC, the chief executive of Google’s DeepMind development project said that:
“Many of the best programmers in the world were asked last year how long it would take for a program to beat a top professional, and most of them were predicting 10-plus years.”
One of the oldest table games still played by humans, Go is a an incredibly complicated game to master. It’s a simple enough set of rules, but the sheer amount of legal positions in the game is considered to be more than the observable number of atoms in the entire universe. Google’s DeepMind project managed to develop an intelligence that could consider the rules of the game and then observe the viable moves and select the absolute best one. Creating a software to follow the rules is simple enough to skilled programmers, but to create one that understands what is a good choice and what is a bad one, enough to defeat a world champion is a task of almost herculean proportions.
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
Featured image via Reilly Butler, available under a Creative Commons License.
