What the AlphaGo experience teaches us
The world witness with awe how the world champion of Go, Lee Sedol got defeated earlier this year by a machine, AlphaGo. This historic event (go is apparently much more difficult than chess for a machine – a machine beat the chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, 19 years ago!) has generated a lot of comments and controversies.
An interesting segment of the comments is that the machine won using strategies that no human had used before, and some found beautiful (see this Wired article). Interestingly enough, quickly however (after 3 stunning defeats though) the human Lee Sedol was able to take the machine to its own game. The graphic analysis of what happened is exposed in this great article very worth reading on Quartz ‘Google’s AI won the game Go by defying millennia of basic human instinct‘.
Is AlphaGo actual Artificial Intelligence? There are even some articles denying it like Why AlphaGo is not AI.
My take on this momentous event is that it shows again that the machine can help us develop new abilities and look at things differently. It probably still cannot equate the humans in learning ability, but does provoke thought supports us by finding new ways to consider problems. And that is possibly the main message from this experiment.
