Although the ever-increasing popularity of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) was essentially caused by the breakthrough of deep learning in 2012, the historic events of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol, the 18-time world champion of GO, 4-1 in March 2016 and then beating Ke Jie, the current #1-ranked GO player, 3-0 in May 2017, contributed in large part to making AI a household acronym. Due to the complexity of the GO game, it was wildly considered an impossible mission, or impossible for at least one more decade, that a computer program would beat top GO players.
After the match between AlphaGo and Ke Jie in May 2017, Google retired AlphaGo; DeepMind, the startup Google acquired for its pioneering deep reinforcement learning technologies and the developer of AlphaGo, decided to focus their AI research on other areas...
