Human dominance in the game of Go is going but not yet gone. That’s one of the clarifying points Gary Marcus makes in a Backchannel piece that looks at Google’s machine intelligence triumphing over a human “champion” in the ancient game. Even when AI becomes the true Go champion, that doesn’t mean such knowledge will be easily transferable to other areas. Furthermore, the psychologist explains that the Google system isn’t in fact a pure neural network but a hybrid. An excerpt:

The European champion of Go is not the world champion, or even close. The BBC, for example, reported that “Google achieves AI ‘breakthrough’ by beating Go champion,” and hundreds of other news outlets picked up essentially the same headline. But Go is scarcely a sport in Europe; and the champion in question is ranked only #633 in the world. A robot that beat the 633rd-ranked tennis pro would be impressive, but it still wouldn’t be fair to say that it had “mastered” the game. DeepMind made major progress, but the Go journey is still not over; a fascinating thread at YCombinator suggests that the program — a work in progress — would currently be ranked #279.

Beyond the far from atypical issue of hype, there is an important technical question: what is the nature of the computer system that won? 

By way of background, there is a long debate about so-called neural net models (which in its most modern form is called “deep-learning”) and classical “Good-old-fashioned Artificial Intelligence” (GOFAI) systems, of the form that the late Marvin Minsky advocated. Minsky, and others like his AI-co-founder John McCarthy grew up in the logicist tradition of Bertrand Russell, and tried to couch artificial intelligence in something like the language of logic. Others, like Frank Rosenblatt in the 50s, and present-day deep learners like Geoffrey Hinton and Facebook’s AI Director Yann LeCun, have couched their models in terms of simplified neurons that are inspired to some degree by neuroscience.

To read many of the media accounts (and even the Facebook posts of some of my colleagues), DeepMind’s victory is a resounding win for the neural network approach, and hence another demerit for Minsky, whose approach has very much lost favor.

But not so fast.•