What a week for Artificial Intelligence.
The death of Marvin Minsky and the announcement of a huge breakthrough in the field as the Google DeepMind team defeats professional Go player, Fan Hui five times in a row. The latter was expected to happen one day, but not for ten years.
Marvin Minsky, who died this week aged 88, was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, and a giant in many other fields: Cognitive Psychology, Maths, Computational Linguistics, Robotics, and Optics and was one of the founders of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. He was still working on research last year.
I hope he heard about DeepMind’s breakthrough in mastering the game of Go. Long regarded as one of the big challenges in AI & computing now that humans have become resigned to losing to computers at chess. Both Google and Facebook have been working hard to crack a problem that is so hard too solve as the possible combination of moves in a game of Go is something like 10 to the power 700.
Nature’s video report on the challenge.
For an accessible write up of why this is big news, there is a Wired Article here and for the mathematically adventurous:
Google Deepmind Mastering Go Research Paper
Don’t go there if you are afraid of mathematics!
Learn how great SaaS & software companies are run
We produce exceptional conferences & content that will help you build better products & companies.
Join our friendly list for event updates, ideas & inspiration.