In March 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sodol, one of the world’s top players of the Chinese game Go, by 4-1, marking the end of what was probably the last great board game AI had to conquer.

What makes Go a particularly difficult problem for computers to at least in the traditional (simplistic) approach is that the number of possible combination moves number more than the atoms in the universe. So it’s impossible to brute force it with the entirety of the computing power we have. Thus it was a good problem for finding alternative approaches.

In August of 2019, I was invited by my friend Preston Adie of Africa’s Talking to attended a panel discussion called “AI in Kenya” with 3 other smart practitioners in the Kenyan data science space: Babatunde Ekemode of Africa’s Talking, Skyler Spearman of IBM, and Fiona Rasanga of Griffin Insurance.

The discussion was wide, ranging from what we thought the state of data science in Kenya was to what trends we saw. It was interesting, and I hope some video of the conversation comes out.