A machine can only “do whatever we know how to order it to perform,” wrote the 19th-century computing pioneer Ada Lovelace. This reassuring statement was made in relation to Charles Babbage’s description of the first mechanical computer.
Lady Lovelace could not have known that in 2016, a program called AlphaGo, designed to play and improve at the board game “Go”, would not only be able to defeat all of its creators, but would do it in ways that they could not explain.
