AlphaGo’s novel Go strategies signaled AI’s readiness for scientific application
AlphaGo’s creation of never-before-seen Go strategies—despite Go’s 2,000+ year history and centuries of professional play—was a pivotal moment for Demis Hassabis, confirming AI’s capacity for genuine novelty and prompting the launch of AlphaFold.
Supporting evidence
Original excerpt
not only did it win the match against Lee Sedol in 2016, it also created famously new strategies that had never been seen before, even though we’ve played Go. Go is the oldest game humanity has invented, it’s 2000 plus years old, and been played professionally for hundreds of years, and we hadn’t discovered those strategies.
Context
It was more about the approach we would have taken would probably be a really interesting algorithmic approach and maybe and hopefully would generalize to other domains. And that’s what turned out with AlphaGo and then it went beyond our wildest dreams really because So that was double whammy for me. I was waiting for that moment that AI was able to come up with something novel and there’s more levels of creativity than that, but beyond that, but at least it was a novel idea. And then that was for me was what I was waiting for to then start using AI for science. So the moment we got back from SOL, we started the AlphaFold project.