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Google's AlphaGo AI Secretively Won More Than 50 Straight Games Against World's Top Go Players (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: When Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo made history by taking down Korea's Lee Sedol -- one of the world's best Go players -- in a landslide 4-1 victory in March, Chinese player Ke Jie was skeptical. He famously wrote on Weibo the next day, "Even if AlphaGo can defeat Lee Sedol, it can't beat me," and has since agreed to take on the AI at an undecided time. But now even Ke, the reigning top-ranked Go player, has acknowledged that human beings are no match for robots in the complex board game, after he lost three games to an AI that mysteriously popped up online in recent days. The AI turned out to be AlphaGo in disguise. On Jan. 4, after winning more than 50 games against several of the world's best Go players, Ke included, a user registered with an ID of "Master" on two Chinese board game platforms came forward to identify itself as AlphaGo. "I'm AlphaGo's Doctor Huang," the user "Master" wrote on foxwq.com, according to screenshots from Chinese media reports. Taiwanese developer Aja Huang is a member of Google's DeepMind team behind the AI. Since Dec. 29, Master has defeated a long list of top Go players including Korea's Park Jung-hwan (world No. 3), Japan's Iyama Yuta (No. 5) and Ke in fast-paced games. He won 51 games straight before his 52nd rival, Chen Yaoye, went offline, forcing the game to be recorded as a tie. By Jan. 4 when the test was completed, Master had racked up 60 wins, plus the one tie, and zero loss, according to numerous reports (link in Chinese).
Star Trek TNG depicted nearly this exact scenario back in July, 1989, with Episode 21 of Season 2, entitled "Peak Performance":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIRT6xRQkf8
I'll be impressed when you write an AI that can competently play Civ5.
I'm not really sure if it's a more difficult problem than Go or not (I'd think so with all of the decisions to be made), but holy hell is the shipped AI in all Civ games useless.
Go games typically end in a resignation, actually. Even decent players can tell when they're going to lose, and playing to the end when it's obvious you're going to lose is considered very rude.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
As we see yet another instance of hubris in action, this time the assertion of Go players and hangers-on that "Go is so much more complex than chess, so it will never be mastered by a machine". Computational complexity or large problem space has little to do with either play-ability or ease of mastery.
Next challenge?