ZAP’S FACTS!
ROBOTS & AI

A computer beat a top Go player using moves no human had ever tried.

AlphaGo beat the world's best Go player in 2016 - and one of its moves was so strange experts thought it was a bug.

2 min read
A computer beat a top Go player using moves no human had ever tried.
THE FULL STORY

Go is an ancient Chinese board game played with black and white stones. The rules are simple, but the board is so large that there are more possible games of Go than there are atoms in the universe. For decades, computer scientists said a machine would not beat top humans for many more years.

In March 2016, a program built by Google’s DeepMind lab called AlphaGo played a five-game match in Seoul, South Korea against Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players of all time. AlphaGo won 4–1. The match was watched by 200 million people around the world.

The most famous moment came in game 2. AlphaGo placed a stone in a spot called Move 37 that no human would ever have considered. Commentators thought it was a mistake. Lee Sedol stared at the board for 12 minutes. It turned out to be a brilliant, alien-feeling move that locked in the win. AlphaGo had taught itself things humans had never seen in 2,500 years of playing.

Chatbots learn to write by reading huge piles of human writing.
DID YOU KNOW? Chatbots learn to write by reading huge piles of human writing. A large language model is trained on millions of books, articles and websites - then guesses the most likely next word, over and over. 2 min read
A robot called Atlas can do backflips and dance.
DID YOU KNOW? A robot called Atlas can do backflips and dance. Boston Dynamics builds humanlike robots that run, jump, parkour and even break-dance - and they keep their balance when shoved. 2 min read
There are taxis in some cities that drive themselves.
DID YOU KNOW? There are taxis in some cities that drive themselves. Self-driving robotaxis in Phoenix, San Francisco and Beijing pick up passengers with no human in the driver's seat at all. 2 min read