Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Computer 1; Human 0

Go, the ancient game created in China several thousand years ago, is now in threat of going down to a computer program. A grandmaster of Go is now playing a 5 game series against a supercomputer in South Korea for a million dollar prize, and the human has lost the first game.

South Korea's Lee Se-dol, a 18-time world champion, is facing Google's DeepMind AlphaGo program in what experts are calling a landmark battle between man and artificial intelligence (AI). Using black-and-white stones on a grid, players are supposed to use their pieces to surround their opponents pieces with their own. Unlike chess, a Go player typically has a choice of 200 moves and as such, many people believe a human player (with human intuition) has an advantage against a computer program.

Obviously this advantage is not enough because DeepMind won the first game. Hopefully, Lee could come back in  the other 4 games. If not, Go is going to join the ranks of chess when IBM's Deep Blue beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1997.

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