Figuring out why AIs get flummoxed by some games

With its Alpha series of game-playing AIs, Google's DeepMind group seemed to have found a way for its AIs to tackle any game, mastering games like chess and Go by repeatedly playing itself during training. But then some odd things happened as people started identifying Go positions that would lose against relative newcomers to the game but easily defeat a similar Go-playing AI.

While beating an AI at a board game may seem relatively trivial, it can help us identify failure modes of the AI...