A British artificial intelligence company founded in September 2010, currently owned by Alphabet Inc. The company is based in London, with research centres in Canada, France, and the United States. Acquired by Google in 2014, the company has created a neural network that learns how to play video games in a fashion similar to that of humans, as well as a neural Turing machine, or a neural network that may be able to access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine, resulting in a computer that mimics the short-term memory of the human brain. The company made headlines in 2016 after its AlphaGo program beat human professional Go player Lee Sedol, the world champion, in a five-game match, which was the subject of a documentary film. A more general program, AlphaZero, beat the most powerful programs playing Go, chess, and shogi (Japanese chess) after a few days of play against itself using reinforcement learning.
