Giving a Visual Language to Artificial Intelligence

First off — please enjoy the documentary, "AlphaGo". The creators of the film did a marvellous job marrying up the human side of the artificial intelligence team from Google's DeepMind group and the game of Go's 'Michael Jordans' with the explanations of machine learning and AI, itself.

"The Game of Go is the holy grail of artificial intelligence. Everything we've ever tried in AI, it just falls over when you try the game of Go." - David Silver, Lead Researcher for AlphaGo

One thing that stuck with me as a data visualizer is the interfaces, the dashboards that the DeepMind team used to 'monitor' or explain the machine learning decisions.

As you can see from the above screen shot, we see a lot charts. I'd be the first to say that the data being visualized might be perfectly designed: machine learning is complex and much of it I still have to learn. But I also know from visualizing data for nearly a decade — don't always assume the most talented people and sophisticated companies have creatively considered adding intuitive and best-practice data visualization to their projects.

I see a lot line graphs — flat line ones, the kind that obscure the interesting insights.

Maybe that's why the team used the black pointer seen in the image. ;)