The Sun UK Edition
Artificial intelligence programs have achieved remarkable success in beating humans in various domains.
1. Chess: IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a world chess champion when it defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. During the pivotal final game, Deep Blue made a move that Kasparov thought only a human could rationalize - Kasparov insisted the IBM team cheated, which they denied. Since then, AI programs like AlphaZero have surpassed human performance in chess.
2. Go: AlphaGo was designed to play the ancient and complex board game Go, which is considered one of the most challenging games for artificial intelligence due to its vast number of possible board configurations and strategic depth. In 2016, AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind, defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol. AlphaGo's successors, such as AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero, have achieved even higher levels of play.
3. Jeopardy: IBM Watson is a powerful and widely known artificial intelligence platform developed by IBM. It's not a single program but a suite of AI and cognitive computing technologies that encompass various capabilities. One of Watson's early achievements was winning the quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. It demonstrated the system's ability to understand and respond to complex natural language questions and quickly find answers in a vast amount of data.
4. Poker: Texas Hold 'em is a card game with random draws, hidden information, and deception, making it an ideal playground for sophisticated artificial intelligence modeling. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University built Libratus, which defeated four of poker's best in head-to-head matchups over the course of 120,000 hands.
It's important to note that AI's ability to beat humans in these domains is not a sign of general intelligence but rather a demonstration of specialized skills in narrow, well-defined tasks. AI systems are created and trained for specific purposes and may not exhibit the same level of adaptability and reasoning that humans possess in a wide range of tasks.