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On Wednesday, after rampaging through China’s top Go playing landscape for seven days and defeating many of the world’s top players online, a mystery player named Master was unveiled as Google’s AlphaGo. Yes, that AlphaGo. Apparently, there’s a new (sort of) top dog in the world of Go today.
A report in today’s Wall Street Journal (Humans Mourn Loss After Google Is Unmasked as China’s Go Master) looks at AlphaGo’s latest exploits. Here’s a brief excerpt:
“Master played with inhuman speed, barely pausing to think. With a wide-eyed cartoon fox as an avatar, Master made moves that seemed foolish but inevitably led to victory this week over the world’s reigning Go champion, Ke Jie of China.
“It was clear by then that Master must be a computer. But whose computer? Master revealed itself Wednesday as an updated version of AlphaGo, an artificial-intelligence program designed by the DeepMind unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google.” Master’s record—60 wins, 0 losses over the seven days ending Wednesday.
Back in March the Google AlphaGo platform shook the Go world with a decisive win over Lee Sedol of South Korea and one of the world’s top Go players. Go is the ancient Chinese strategy board whose number of possible moves is vast – 10761 compared to the 10120 possible in chess – making it an extremely complex game despite its relatively simple rules. The final score in the AlphaGo – Sedol match was 4-1. The match lasted roughly a week.
More from the WSJ: “After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong,” Mr. Ke, 19, wrote on Chinese social media platform Weibo after his defeat. “I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.”
Link to full WSJ article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-program-vanquishes-human-players-of-go-in-china-1483601561?mod=social_content_enginlife
Link to earlier HPCwire article (Google’s AlphaGo Defeats Go Star Lee Sedol): https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/03/16/googles-alphago-defeats-go-champion-lee-sadol/
