John McCormac discusses his takeaways from the RSS 2016 Workshop ‘Are the Sceptics Right? Limits and Potentials of Deep Learning in Robotics’ and highlights interesting themes and topics from the discussion.

Google’s AI machine won 4 out of 5 games in a $1.3 million contest against South Korean Lee Sedol, rated as the world’s best Go player.

Update: The final match was played on Tuesday, 15 March, with AlphaGo winning over Lee Sedol 4-1! Watch all the livestream matches below.

In episode five of season two, Ryan walks us through variational inference. We put some listener questions about Go and how to play it to Andy Okun, president of the American Go Association (who is in Seoul, South Korea, watching the Lee Sedol/AlphaGo games). Plus, we hear from Suchi Saria of Johns Hopkins about applying machine learning to understanding health care data.

Google-backed DeepMind created an AI sophisticated enough to beat a human champion in the Chinese board game Go, marking another milestone of development and progress in AI research. What will be next as we raise the bar?