All of this is exciting, and the results leave no doubt: deep learning works for certain tasks. But it is the antithesis of transparency. Even AlphaGo’s programmers cannot tell you why the program plays so well. They knew from experience that deep networks have been successful at tasks in computer vision and speech recognition. Nevertheless, our understanding of deep learning is completely empirical and comes with no guarantees. The AlphaGo team could not have predicted at the outset that the program would beat the best human in a year, or two, or five. They simply experimented, and it did.
