Since the 1990s, computers have continually gotten better at beating us at our own games, like chess, checkers, poker, and Jeopardy. But expert human players continue to dominate machines at one game: Go. The more than 2,500 years old board game, in which two players use black and white stones to try to capture more territory than their opponent, is extremely complex, which has made it difficult for computers to master. But it seems as though our supremacy in Go may have finally ended—researchers at Google DeepMind announced today that they’ve created a sophisticated AI computer program—a combination of deep neural networks and a search techniques—that has beaten a Go champion for the first time in history.
