HBR Guide to AI Basics for Managers

CHAPTER 21

Reinforcement Learning Is Ready for Business

by Kathryn Hume and Matthew E. Taylor

Lee Sedol, a world-class Go champion, was flummoxed by the 37th move Deepmind’s AlphaGo made in the second match of the famous 2016 series. So flummoxed that it took him nearly 15 minutes to formulate a response. The move was strange to other experienced Go players as well, with one commentator suggesting it was a mistake. In fact, it was a canonical example of an artificial intelligence algorithm learning something that seemed to go beyond just pattern recognition in data—learning something strategic and even creative. Indeed, beyond just feeding the algorithm past examples of Go champions playing games, Deepmind developers trained AlphaGo by having ...