Artificial intelligence is an area that has constantly fascinated me, perhaps because it tries to approach what is the most mysterious in our universe: our capacity for elaborate reasoning which gives us our remarkable intelligence. Perhaps also then because, by studying intelligence through machines, we always discover a little more about ourselves. Either way, my interest was doubled when I heard on the radio that the DeepMind company had accomplished a remarkable feat. In March 2016, his software AlphaGo defeated one of the strongest professional players in the world at the game of go.

The achievement is extraordinary as the game of go is extremely complex to master and was then considered to be one of the few where humans still had an advantage over the machine. Due to its enormous combinatorial complexity, only human intuition was able to offer an adequate level of play, while software enjoyed only a mediocre level. This announcement really made me want to explore this subject, but it was only in mid-2020, in full confinement, that I took advantage of the extra time at my disposal during this crisis to put this idea to fruition. My goal, however, was not to redevelop AlphaGo, well … not exclusively. What I wanted was above all a platform on which to easily add board games that one could play with in a browser, as well as the possibility of incorporating all kinds of AI, including the algorithm used in AlphaGo.

At this point it is interesting to take a tour at this address to get an idea of the result. It is possible to play a few games there, against different types of artificial intelligence. The images below show the available games.