A.I.

[Nick]

These developments are very clever, but games are typically between a small number of players with very clearly defined rules. For chess and go, they are also games with perfect information; there is nothing hidden. Bridge and poker are more interesting because there is incomplete information. I think that machines have made significant advances in poker.

As for curing the common cold or creating world peace, machines are nowhere near as good as humans. Not that humans are very good at these things either.

What is REALLY interesting is the use of neural nets and genuine AI in training systems to analyse mammograms, retinal scans and colonoscopy images.

With mammograms, there is a preexisting MASSIVE data-set with known outcomes - you don't tell the systems what to look for, just here's an image and the outcome was positive or negative - the systems determines where the indicators lie. The results are so far extremely encouraging. The system is also being used to identify current false negatives & positives, again with encouraging results. The ability to handle Tomosynthesis data is also being added.

Colon cancer is a notoriously difficult disease to diagnose - AI-based systems are proving more accurate with less missed positives and less false positives, just as in mammography.

The retinal scan project is in conjunction with Moorfields Eye Hospital (who saved my sight) - again, using preexisting datasets of images and known outcomes to determine whether precursors of issues are present.

In all these examples, the AI systems work with existing human consultants to aid diagnosis and treatment - they also help improve the quality of the consultants' skills by indicating where on the images the AI system has determined there's a possible issue.

These are areas where AI (in it's current form) can really help.  All positive.