So, that sounds awfully familiar… “a result without a why.”
In September 2016, Google’s DeepMind (deep neural networks resembling brain neurons) “watched” millions of Go games, an ancient game with more potential moves than there are atoms in the universe. The game is famously thought to rely on human intuition, an area where human intelligence would always trump computer intelligence.
However, DeepMind won against the human Go world champion - and it was regarded a mystery as to how it was able to learn and “out intuition” a human!
According to scientists Henry Lin at Harvard and Max Tegmark at MIT, the answer to the mystery lies in physics. While the total number of possible algorithms that could yield solutions are mind-bogglingly large - the number of algorithms that actually work in real life (the life that games like Go exist in) are relatively few.