AI image courtesy of Ahmed Elgammal

‘AlphaGo,’ (Greg Kohs, 2017) is a documentary that follows a Go tournament between DeepMind’s AI program AlphaGo and Go champion Lee Sudol. In this documentary, we witness AlphaGo defeat Lee Sudol 4-1 much to the surprise of the people of Korea.

At first, this surprise shocked me, as we know that computers can be programmed to learn patterns and process them much faster than us. However, what I did not know was that Go is a very intuitive game, and by AlphaGo being able to defeat a human means that “its developers have figured out a way of bottling that intuitive sense.”(Nielsen, 2016.) In fact, throughout the documentary, we even see some of AlphaGo’s moves being described as beautiful and creative. 

The discovery of robotic intuition lead me to do some research, where I discovered the ‘black box’ issue of deep learning AI.