If you’re a tech giant crunching almost incomprehensible amounts of data, the odds are pretty good that at least part of your company is researching artificial intelligence. Facebook is certainly doing that. On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg posted that a team of Facebook researchers had started developing an artificial intelligence that could play the Chinese game Go.
He wrote:
The ancient Chinese game of Go is one of the last games where the best human players can still beat the best artificial intelligence players. Last year, the Facebook AI Research team started creating an AI that can learn to play Go.
Scientists have been trying to teach computers to win at Go for 20 years. We’re getting close, and in the past six months we’ve built an AI that can make moves in as fast as 0.1 seconds and still be as good as previous systems that took years to build.
Ten hours later, Google announced that they had already done it.
I have no idea how any of this actually works. Who will dominate the Go AI market in 2016? It’s too early to say, but it looks like the market is getting crowded.
