Is Artificial Intelligence just about beating a person in the game of Go? I guess not, people have been playing that game for a long time in addition to doing several other things at the same time, including learning new things. To be able to beat a person at a game is not a lofty goal to achieve. Anyways, machines have been doing a lot of work not possible by humans already. They are becoming more intelligent over time though.

So going back to the question of Go.. Did the machine learn on its own? the clear answer is no. It was just following an algorithm programmed by its creators. Does that make it non-intelligent. Again the answer is no. Just because the machine didn’t learn doesn’t mean it is not intelligent. A lot of intelligence comes from programmers inputting specific algorithms. Those algorithms sometimes update themselves leading to “learning”. Nevertheless the intelligence comes from the algorithms/programs, whether they learn or not.

A machine able to predict an event is intelligent because of the prediction algorithms. It may not be able to learn to predict new types of events but it still is useful. In a way learning is only a part of intelligence. Intelligence converting knowledge/data into actionable information. Whereas machine learning would just focus on classifying or predicting. Machine intelligence when applied to business can create much bigger impact than pure machine learning. To start with the intelligence has to be fed in by experts.