Hasta La Motion!

Google DeepMind project AlphaGo won the Innovation Lions Grand Prix at Cannes International Festival of Creativity. AlphaGo is a computing system designed around intuition in a way that made it possible to beat one of the world’s best players in the game of Go. DeepMind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company founded in 2011 by Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg, was acquired by Google in 2014. The company took on the challenge of an artificial intelligence approach to the game of Go, an ancient board game much more complex than chess. With more than 200 possible moves for every turn, it is impossible for a machine to calculate all options within a reasonable period of time. AlphaGo narrows the choices without having to consider every option.

AlphaGo was put to the test in March 2016 with a set of five games against South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol. Aja Huang, a DeepMind team member and amateur 6-dan Go player, placed stones on the Go board for AlphaGo, which ran through Google’s cloud computing with its servers located in the United States. All five games were broadcast on the DeepMind YouTube channel. AlphaGo won four out of the five games. The $1 million USD prize money was donated to charities, including UNICEF.