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Google's AlphaGo AI Defeats the World's Best Human Go Player (engadget.com)
It isn't looking good for humanity. Google's AI AlphaGo on Tuesday defeated Ke Jie, the world's number one Go player, in the first game of a three-part match. The new win comes a year after AlphaGo beat Korean legend Lee Se-dol 4-1 in one of the most potent demonstrations of the power of AI to date. Adding insult to the injury, AlphaGo scored the victory over humanity's best candidate in China, the place where the abstract and intuitive board game was born. Engadget adds: After the match, Google's DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis explained that this was how AlphaGo was programmed: to maximise its winning chances, rather than the winning margin. This latest iteration of the AI player, nicknamed Master, apparently uses 10 times less computational power than its predecessor that beat Lee Sedol, working from a single PC connected to Google's cloud server. [...] The AI player picked up a 10-15 point lead early on, which limited the possibilities for Jie to respond. Jie was occasionally winning during the flow of the match, but AlphaGo would soon reclaim the lead, ensuring that his human opponent had limited options to win as the game progressed.
Go. By a very, very, very, very, very large margin.
I think you miss the point. Due to the complexity of Go in the sense that any turn can be played on dozens if not hundreds of spaces, computers could not brute force their way to victory. The reason this is important is because A: it shows a computer using something other than brute force to solve a logistical problem, and B: the program has the ability to be self taught beyond learning the basic rules (and rule sets don't get much more basic than Go). Yes, a computer beat a human, but this is a much different victory than winning at chess.