A computer yesterday defeated China’s top player of the ancient board game go in the latest test of whether artificial intelligence (AI) can master one of the last games that machines have yet to dominate.
Ke Jie (柯潔), a 19-year-old prodigy, is due to play a three-game match against AlphaGo in Wuzhen, west of Shanghai.
During the five-day event, the computer is also to face off against other top-ranked Chinese players.
AlphaGo beat Ke by a half-point, “the closest margin possible,” according to Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, the Google-owned company that developed AlphaGo.
“AlphaGo wins game 1!” said Hassabis on Twitter. “Ke Jie fought bravely and some wonderful moves were played.”
Go, which originated in China more than 25 centuries ago, has avoided mastery by machines even as computers surpassed humans in most other games. They conquered chess in 1997 when IBM Corp’s Deep Blue system defeated champion Garry Kasparov.
Go, known as weiqi (圍棋) in China and baduk in Korea, is considered more challenging because the near-infinite number of possible positions requires intuition and flexibility.
Players take turns putting white or black stones on a rectangular grid with 361 intersections, trying to surround larger areas of the board while also capturing each other’s pieces. Competitors play until both agree there are no more places to put stones or one quits.
Players had expected it to be at least another decade before computers could beat the best humans due to go’s complexity and reliance on intuition, but AlphaGo surprised them in 2015 by beating a European champion. Last year, it defeated South Korea’s top player, Lee Sedol.
AlphaGo was designed to mimic such intuition in tackling complex tasks. Google officials said they want to apply those technologies to areas such as smartphone assistants and solving real-world problems.
Human players were startled when AlphaGo scored its first major upset in October 2015 by defeating a European champion.
AlphaGo defeated Lee in four out of five games during a weeklong match in March last year.
Lee lost the first three games, then came back to win the fourth, after which he said he took advantages of weaknesses including AlphaGo’s poor response to surprises.
Go is hugely popular in Asia, with tens of millions of players in Taiwan, China, Japan and the two Koreas.
Google said a broadcast of Lee’s match with AlphaGo was watched by a about 280 million people.
Players have said AlphaGo enjoys some advantages because it does not get tired or emotionally rattled, two critical aspects of the mentally intense game.
Yemen’s separatist leader has vowed to keep working for an independent state in the country’s south, in his first social media post since he disappeared earlier this month after his group briefly seized swathes of territory. Aidarous al-Zubaidi’s United Arab Emirates (UAE)-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) forces last month captured two Yemeni provinces in an offensive that was rolled back by Saudi strikes and Riyadh’s allied forces on the ground. Al-Zubaidi then disappeared after he failed to board a flight to Riyadh for talks earlier this month, with Saudi Arabia accusing him of fleeing to Abu Dhabi, while supporters insisted he was
‘SHOCK TACTIC’: The dismissal of Yang mirrors past cases such as Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle, who was executed after being accused of plotting to overthrow his nephew North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has fired his vice premier, compared him to a goat and railed against “incompetent” officials, state media reported yesterday, in a rare and very public broadside against apparatchiks at the opening of a critical factory. Vice Premier Yang Sung-ho was sacked “on the spot,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, in a speech in which Kim attacked “irresponsible, rude and incompetent leading officials.” “Please, comrade vice premier, resign by yourself when you can do it on your own before it is too late,” Kim reportedly said. “He is ineligible for an important duty. Put simply, it was
‘TERRORIST ATTACK’: The convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri resulted in the ‘martyrdom of five of our armed forces,’ the Presidential Leadership Council said A blast targeting the convoy of a Saudi Arabian-backed armed group killed five in Yemen’s southern city of Aden and injured the commander of the government-allied unit, officials said on Wednesday. “The treacherous terrorist attack targeting the convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri, commander of the Second Giants Brigade, resulted in the martyrdom of five of our armed forces heroes and the injury of three others,” Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed Presidential Leadership Council said in a statement published by Yemeni news agency Saba. A security source told reporters that a car bomb on the side of the road in the Ja’awla area in
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
RSS