Google's AlphaGo Beats Lee Se-dol In the First Match (theverge.com)

New submitter Fref writes with news from The Verge that "A huge milestone has just been reached in the field of artificial intelligence: AlphaGo, the program developed by Google's DeepMind unit, has defeated legendary Go player Lee Se-dol in the first of five historic matches being held in Seoul, South Korea. Lee resigned after about three and a half hours, with 28 minutes and 28 seconds remaining on his clock. "
Lee will face off against AlphaGo again tomorrow and on Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday. Also at the New York Times. Science magazine says the loss may be less significant than it seems at first.

Comments

Re:Big Whoop

[Lisandro]

I am still waiting for a computer who can recognize my bags at a conveyor belt at least as efficiently as me

I've worked with industrial vision devices in the past and trust me, you could set up a machine to recognize luggage as efficiently as a human being today if you wanted to. In fact, it will do better.

The only thing surprising about the Go event is that it did not happen like ten, or even twenty, years ago. You may be impressed, but I find this most underwhelming.

That's likely because you don't understand what it involves. Go is unlike chess in the sense that just throwing raw computing power at the problem won't help you at all; for a "small" 13x13 there are over 10^300 valid game trees to compute, and the number gets exponentially worse once the board increases in size. For reference, the estimated number of atoms in the universe is 10^130.

Google's AlphaGo engine is an actual machine-learning AI which had to be trained plays the game much like a regular person would - Myungwan Kim actually remarked that it feels like playing against a human being. Having a competitive Go engine today is a major milestone, make no mistake about it.