Google AI has mastered the ancient game Go

AlphaGo playing Go

Some cool facts about AlphaGo -

1. AlphaGo was not programmed to play Go, rather it learned using a general-purpose algorithm that allowed it to interpret the game's pattern. DeepMind program has also learned to play 49 different arcade games. Even IBM chess Computer Deep Mind, which famously beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, was "explicitly" programmed to win the Game.

2.In China, Japan and South Korea, Go is hugely popular and is even played by celebrity professionals. But the game has long intrested AI researchers because of its complexity. The rules are relatively simple: the goal is to gain the most territory by placing and capturing black and white stones on a 19*19 grid.
3. The average 150-move game contains more possible board configurations -- 10^170 -- more than there are atoms in the Universe. So it can't be solved by algorithm that search exhaustively for the best move.

4. In Go, recognizing winning and losing positions is much harder: stones have equal values and can have subtle impacts far across the board.

5. The technique used in the AlphaG is Deep Learning, which is going from success to success.