1.15 Intro to Data Science: Artificial Intelligence—at the Intersection of CS and Data Science

  • When a baby first opens its eyes, does it “see” its parent’s faces?
  • Does it understand any notion of what a face is—or even what a simple shape is?
  • Babies must “learn” the world around them
  • That’s what artificial intelligence (AI) is doing today
  • It’s looking at massive amounts of data and learning from it

1.15 Intro to Data Science: Artificial Intelligence—at the Intersection of CS and Data Science (cont.)

  • AI is being used to
    • play games
    • implement a wide range of computer-vision applications
    • enable self-driving cars
    • enable robots to learn to perform new tasks
    • diagnose medical conditions
    • translate speech to other languages in near real time
    • create chatbots that can respond to arbitrary questions using massive databases of knowledge
    • much more
  • The ultimate goal of all this learning is artificial general intelligence—an AI that can perform intelligence tasks as well as humans

Artificial-Intelligence Milestones

  • Several milestones captured people’s attention and imagination, made the general public start thinking that AI is real and made businesses think about commercializing AI
  • 1997: In a match between IBM’s DeepBlue computer system and chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov, DeepBlue became the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion under tournament conditions
    • IBM loaded DeepBlue with hundreds of thousands of grandmaster chess games
    • DeepBlue was capable of using brute force to evaluate up to 200 million moves per second!

Artificial-Intelligence Milestones (cont.)

  • 2011: IBM’s Watson beat the two best human Jeopardy! players in a \$1 million match
    • Watson simultaneously used hundreds of language-analysis techniques to locate correct answers in 200 million pages of content (including all of Wikipedia)
    • Watson was trained with machine learning and reinforcement-learning techniques
  • Go—a board game created in China thousands of years ago—is widely considered to be one of the most complex games ever invented with 10170 possible board configurations
    • To give you a sense of how large a number that is, it’s believed that there are (only) between 1078 and 1087 atoms in the known universe!
    • 2015: AlphaGo—created by Google’s DeepMind group—used deep learning with two neural networks to beat the European Go champion Fan Hui
    • Go is considered to be a far more complex game than chess

Artificial-Intelligence Milestones (cont.)

  • More recently, Google generalized its AlphaGo AI to create AlphaZero—a game-playing AI that teaches itself to play other games
    • December 2017: AlphaZero learned the rules of and taught itself to play chess in less than four hours using reinforcement learning
    • It then beat the world champion chess program, Stockfish 8, in a 100-game match—winning or drawing every game
    • After training itself in Go for just eight hours, AlphaZero was able to play Go vs. its AlphaGo predecessor, winning 60 of 100 games

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