DailyDirt: AlphaGo Plays Better Go Than Puny Humans...
In case you missed it, humanity has been dealt a decisive intellectual blow by a go-playing computer program called AlphaGo. We mentioned AlphaGo back in January when Google announced that it had defeated European Go champion Fan Hui and was challenging Lee Sedol next. So now that the results are in, AlphaGo has shown the world that artificial intelligence can best the best of humanity at our most difficult games. We've seen this already with chess, and if you don't remember, people tried to make a variant of chess called Arimaa that humans could hold up as a game people could win over computers (ahem, that didn't work). We still have Calvinball, Diplomacy and certain forms of poker....
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- AlphaGo won the match 4-1, beating the 18-time world champion soundly and winning a $1 million prize. This is a major milestone for AI, and this win and its coverage will spur more AI research (and counteract the AI winter of the 1970s). [url]
- In the second game of the five-game match, AlphaGo made a very non-human move. This unorthodox move was described as "beautiful" -- and could lead to more non-intuitive strategies for human go players. [url]
- AlphaGo was defeated in game 4 by Lee Sedol, as Lee found a weakness in the algorithm to exploit. The commentary on the game will probably be discussed and continued by expert Go players for years to come, but it's likely that go-playing software will improve -- whereas humans won't be able to upgrade their skills so readily. [url]
- Plenty of naysayers predicted that computers would never reach this level of play and beat a top go champion. However, there's at least one person (computer scientist Feng-Hsiung Hsu) with written evidence who predicted in 2007 that go software would de-throne top human players before 2017. [url]
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