13 March 2016

What Games Teach Us About Intelligence

In the coming days, Google DeepMind’s alphaGo program is expected to defeat one of the world’s leading professional Go players, Lee Sedol, in a best-of-five unhandicapped Go matchup. AlphaGo has already won the first two games, and a profound reality is upon us: the walls are crumbling around one of the last major strongholds of superior human intelligence. This looming defeat raises important questions for research on human intelligence. What can we learn from continued advances in gameplay artificial intelligence? What role can games play in measuring continued progress in research on intelligence more generally? Is there an “endgame” for the role of games in AI research?


The lasting importance of games in AI research, beyond serving as a source of well-defined and widely understood challenge problems, is that they provide a unique means of measuring intelligence through task-based comparisons. Intelligence is notoriously difficult to measure, even in humans. Games offer simple and useful comparisons of skills, reasoning skills. Overall, games provide a rich framework for measuring progress in machine reasoning capabilities through competitive comparisons. Computer Go will likely continue to be relevant to AI researchers for quite some time, and it will be exciting to see how the related wide range of challenges are met by the broad AI research community.

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