Slashdot Mirror


Computer Beats Go Champion

Koreantoast writes: Go (weiqi), the ancient Chinese board game, has long been held up as one of the more difficult, unconquered challenges facing AI scientists... until now. Google DeepMind researchers, led by David Silver and Demis Hassabis, developed a new algorithm called AlphaGo, enabling the computer to soundly defeat European Go champion Fan Hui in back-to-back games, five to zero. Played on a 19x19 board, Go players have more than 300 possible moves per turn to consider, creating a huge number of potential scenarios and a tremendous computational challenge. All is not lost for humanity yet: DeepMind is scheduled to face off in March with Lee Sedol, considered one of the best Go players in recent history, in a match compared to the Kasparov-Deep Blue duels of previous decades.

3 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The Future! by mbkennel · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've read the paper.

    It doesn't quite use a "brute-force" approach, but it certainly does use significant, and intelligently designed, Monte Carlo searches which are informed by well-trained neural networks. The neural-network alone approach, without any Monte Carlo search during play, is not as strong, though it does appear to equal a state of the art conventional Go program. See Figure 4b.

    And the training of the neural networks and construction of their training sets certainly did need quite a bit of 'brute force' as well as 'efficiently wielded force in large quantity'.

  2. Videos by WalksOnDirt · · Score: 3, Informative

    Videos are available.

    --
    a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
  3. Re:Don't fool yourself, poker will be solved easy by RockDoctor · · Score: 3, Informative
    Irrelevant.

    Poker is a game of incomplete knowledge - you don't know what cards are in the other players hands.

    Go is a game of complete knowledge. As is chess. And draughts.

    The two classes are completely different.

    --
    Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"