Google's AlphaGo Will Face Its Biggest Challenge Yet Next Month -- But Why Is It Still Playing? (theguardian.com)

From a report on The Guardian: A year on from its victory over Go star Lee Sedol, Google DeepMind is preparing a "festival" of exhibition matches for its board game-playing AI, AlphaGo, to see how far it has evolved in the last 12 months. Headlining the event will be a one-on-one match against the current number one player of the ancient Asian game, 19-year-old Chinese professional Ke Jie. DeepMind has had its eye on this match since even before AlphaGo beat Lee. On the eve of his trip to Seoul in March 2016, the company's co-founder, Demis Hassabis, told the Guardian: "There's a young kid in China who's very, very strong, who might want to play us." As well as the one-on-one match with Jie, which will be played over the course of three games, AlphaGo will take part in two other games with slightly odder formats. But why is Google's AI still playing Go, you ask? An article on The Outline adds: Its [Google's] experiments with Go -- a game thought to be years away from being conquered by AI before last year -- are designed to bring us closer to designing a computer with human-like understanding that can solve problems like a human mind can. Historically, there have been tasks that humans do well -- communicating, improvising, emoting -- and tasks that computers do well, which tend to be those that require lots of computations -- like math of any kind, including statistical analysis and modeling of, say, journeying to the moon. Slowly, artificial intelligence scientists have been pushing that barrier. [...] Go is played on a board with an 19-by-19 grid (updated after readers pointed out it's not 18x18 grid). Each player takes turn placing stones (one player with white, the other with black) on empty intersections of the grid. The goal is to completely surround the stones of another player, removing them from the board. The number of possible positions compared to chess thanks in part to the size of the board and ability to take any unoccupied position is part of what makes it so complex. As DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis put it last year, "There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible positions."

Comments

Grid

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a 19x19 grid, not 18x18.

Re:Grid

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, also:

The goal is to completely surround the stones of another player, removing them from the board.

Only beginning players think that. The true goal of the game is to occupy more territory than the opponent.

By the way, the best source of information on go is probably Go Sensei

Geeze, use scientic notation already!

[mark-t]

Yeah, we get it... it's a big number. But writing it out longhand like that is just being needlessly cryptic... and at worst comes across as having been written by somebody who doesn't know shit about the actual number of combinations, and just decided to put a lot of zeros after the end of a 1 to make a number that sounds big. Try 1x10^172. This is far more readable, and those that know scientific notation will be able to understand just how big this number is.

If you really feel that this doesn't adequately describe the scale of the number to people who don't know scientific notation, and want your article to be comprehensible to those people as well, then you can also add that it is considerably greater than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe. And to be frank, if that doesn't convey just how fucking big the number is, then explicitly writing 172 zeros after a 1 isn't liable to either.