10 Scary Advancements in AI

6. AlphaGo Beats the Champ

Solving checkers was a breeze compared to solving Go, the 2,500-year-old board game invented in China. Go is so complex that there are more possible positions on a Go board, “than the number of atoms in the universe, and more than a googol times larger than chess.” The game is so complex that it was thought that only a human mind could achieve mastery of the game, as it requires a level of imagination that computers simply couldn’t imitate. Until Google’s AlphaGo, which has handily beaten the top Go players in the world, mastering a millennia old game and — in Google’s ominous words — achieving, “one of the grand challenges of AI.” Uh-oh.