Gadgetory

Google just made one giant leap to outsmarting mankind I'm Bridget Carey this is your CNET update googles artificial intelligence division deepmind created a computer that achieved what no one thought a computer could do beat a human at the most complicated board game the ancient Chinese game of go this is such an impressive breakthrough because go is unlike any other game for a computer to process computers began to beat humans at games back in 1952 with tic-tac-toe then it master checkers in 94 and in 97 IBM's deep blue won at chess against champion Garry Kasparov and in all those situations the computer is using a brute-force method of computing it's looking at every single possible move to calculate the best play but a computer cannot do that with go this 2500 year old game of black and white stones has too many options to consider all the possible moves the goal is to surround more territory on the board than your opponent but there are more possible positions than there are atoms in the universe that's ten to the power of a hundred and seventy so the artificial intelligence must find a balance between recognizing the important moves but also just plain smart without knowing all the outcomes it's sort of like our intuition Google's system called alphago took on the current european go champion fan huai and beat him five times in a row who I said that Google's machine did make some mistakes it gave him confidence there but in the end he couldn't beat the machine next up google's alphago will travel to south korea to battle the top go player in the world but it's not all about games this AI processing power could be applied to real-world problems like helping humans tackle questions in medicine experts didn't think computers could do this for another ten years so every other tech store you have today just won't be as cool in comparison but we can get through this without being mean to the other stories right all right so PayPal's venmo can now be used to pay for things in other apps that means the same app you used to pay back your friends can now pay for online purchases not quite it all works with two apps game time and mantri I don't know what the heck Amun tree is and I don't know if I want to know and there is some Apple news the company is recalling some models of its AC wall adapter sold with Macs and iOS devices because of a shock risk it's not for the plug sold in the United States or the UK this is for outlets in Europe Korea Australia New Zealand Argentina and Brazil that's not the only recall Microsoft is recalling some surface pro power cables for overheating problems yeah Google does win all news today that's it for your tech news update you can dive into more at cnet.com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey