For many decades of his life my grandfather, Karl-Ernst Paech, strongly contributed to establishing the board game "Go" in Europe (see e.g. this email or this article). He was also a huge fan of any kind of science fiction. Earlier this month, almost three years after his passing, his two passions became forever intertwined: Achieving an incredible feat that would have been considered mere fiction not too long ago, Google's AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence system, managed to beat one of the best Go-players in the world. Apparently, just a few weeks earlier, Space-X and Tesla's Elon Musk is quoted to have suggested that experts in the field expect computers to be advanced enough for this sort of victory at the earliest maybe 10 or so years in the future. AlphaGo uses machine learning techniques among others, which are becoming increasingly common in our computerized world. Even in my volcano research I've been applying this kind of method - granted, many times less advanced than the ones built into AlphaGo.
I'm not sure whether my granddad would have been extremely excited about this new development, or - in typical elderly man mannerism - slightly outraged about the fact that the young Go champion was silly enough to be beaten by a machine. One things is for certain though: After this amazing achievement, we can expect many other surprises from artificial intelligence!
