[Courtesy of Google]
Google's artificial intelligence has a long way to go before acting flexibly like humans despite its landmark victory in a showdown with South Korean Go master Lee Sedol, its creator said.
AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google's artificial intelligence (AI) team DeepMind, scored a 4-1 victory against Lee, one of the world's best players, in a five-game match in Seoul that ended on Tuesday.
The victory stunned the world, but scientists say AI still has a long way to go before it can truly match the ingenuity of the human mind.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis admitted in a Google blog post that it was "just one small, albeit significant, step along the way to making machines smart".
DeepMind's original goal is to create "general-purpose artificial intelligence that can learn on its own and, eventually, be used as a tool to help society solve some of its biggest and most pressing problems, from climate change to disease diagnosis", he said.
"AlphaGo has the ability to look globally across a board and find solutions that humans either have been trained not to play or would not consider. This has huge potential for using AlphaGo-like technology to find solutions that humans don’t necessarily see in other areas," Hassabis said.
Deep neural networks are already used at Google for specific tasks like image recognition, speech recognition, and search ranking, he said.
"However, we’re still a long way from a machine that can learn to flexibly perform the full range of intellectual tasks a human can -- the hallmark of true artificial general intelligence," he said.
"Because the machine learning methods we've used in AlphaGo are general purpose, we hope to apply some of these techniques to other challenges in the future. Game on!."
Aju News Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
