THE REAL MAGAZINE ISSUE 4 | Page 10

DEEPMIND Artificial Intelligence Gaming and Tech – DeepMind AI Artificial intelligence. The stuff of the future…or maybe not. If you’ve seen the popular movie franchise Terminator, or the Will Smith hit iRobot you will have noticed that science fiction depicts Artificial Intelligence as a danger to humankind. Fortunately Artificial Intelligence in our real world is far less sinister. In essence artificial intelligence, AI, refers to the ability of a computer system to naturally learn in the way humans do. Now this may seem unnecessary when you consider the fact that computers perform calculations at far greater speeds than the average human. The thing is, however, the abilities of normal computers are limited by the ingenuity of the engineers. Basically an engineer can create a computer with X abilities and that’s it…but once a computer has the ability to learn, it can grow its abilities in the same way humans do, thus never becoming obsolete. At least that is the goal at the Google owned DeepMind AI program. Recently the DeepMind AI became the first computer to beat a human champion in a game of GO, a popular Chinese strategy board game considered much harder than chess. Games are only the beginning…soon we may have intelligent computers performing medical operations far too complex for humans to do. The possibilities are endless. 8