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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.
What makes this especially interesting, is the victory was not achieved with the sort of brute-force approach used by Deep Blue in chess. This used a deep neural net, and algorithms similar to how we believe that humans think. Last time I heard about this, they could consistently beat humans on a 9x9 board, and were working on 13x13. I was surprised to hear that can already win on a full sized 19x19 board. I thought that was still a few years away. This is amazing progress.
As wickerprints pointed out, this is completely false. A good move in a local position in Go may not be the best move overall and may, in fact, be a bad move when other areas on the board are taken into consideration. If a computer program split the board into smaller and smaller sections it could very easily get confused by a good player. Also, the number of moves possible at any given time in Go is exponentially higher than in Chess; you can brute force every possible path in Chess, you can't (not yet) in Go. It wasn't that it was more popular; it was much easier.
-SaNo
I googled Fan Hui: one source says he's 8 dan amateur, another that he's 2 dan pro. That's only a little bit better than go programs have been for several years, and much weaker than the best professional players. If he's a top player in Europe, that mostly says that go isn't played at a very high level in Europe. I think that the progress that has been made on go software is really great, but the claim to have beat a 'go champion' seems a bit of a spin.
strategy that computer algorithms ... have had tremendous difficulty in emulating
Programmers have had tremendous difficulty creating an algorithm that will emulate that stratergy.
Quit blaming computers and programs for the failings of their creator.