It’s man vs machine this week as Google’s artificial intelligence programme AlphaGo faces the world’s top-ranked Go player in a contest expected to end in another victory for the machine.
Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo took on the Chinese world number one of the ancient board game today in the first of three planned games, beating its human opponent by a narrow margin.
It is the second time the AI has gone head-to-head with a master Go player in a public showdown, after stunning the world last year by trouncing South Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol four games to one.
AlphaGo, part of Google’s DeepMind project, competed against Ke Jie, currently ranked as the top player in the world, at an event held in the eastern Chinese water town of Wuzhen. The software beat the master player by half a point, snatching victory by the narrowest margin possible in the game, a characteristic trait of the AI’s style of play.AlphaGo will go up against Mr Ke in two more matches slated for Thursday and Saturday this week.Go, an ancient Chinese board game, is favoured by AI researchers because of the large number of outcomes compared to other games such as western chess. AlphaGo stunned observers last year by trouncing South Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol four games to one.Mr Lee’s loss in Seoul marked the first time a computer programme had beaten a top player in a full match in the 3,000-year-old Chinese board game, and has been hailed as a landmark event in the development of AI.
AlphaGo, part of Google’s DeepMind project, is competing against Ke Jie, 19, currently ranked as the top player in the world, at an event held in the eastern Chinese water town of Wuzhen.
The software beat the master player by half a point, snatching victory by the narrowest margin possible in the game, a characteristic trait of the AI’s style of play.
AlphaGo will go up against Mr Ke in two more matches slated for Thursday and Saturday this week.
Go, an ancient Chinese board game, is favoured by AI researchers because of the large number of outcomes compared to other games such as western chess.
According to Google there are more potential positions in a Go game than atoms in the universe.
Speaking ahead of the matches Demis Hassabis, founder of London-based DeepMind which developed AlphaGo, said ‘AlphaGo’s successes hint at the possibility for general AI to be applied to a wide range of tasks and areas, to perhaps find solutions to problems that we as human experts may not have considered.’
Mr Lee’s loss in Seoul last March marked the first time a computer programme had beaten a top player in a full match of the 3,000-year-old Chinese board game, and has been hailed as a landmark event in the development of AI.
After AlphaGo flattened Mr Lee, Mr Ke declared he would never lose to the machine.
‘Bring it on,’ he said on China’s Twitter-like Weibo, but he has tempered his bravado since then.
Ke was among many top Chinese players who were defeated in online contests in January by a mysterious adversary who reportedly won 60 straight victories.
That opponent, cheekily calling itself ‘The Master’, was later revealed by DeepMind to have been an updated AlphaGo.
‘Even that was not AlphaGo’s best performance,’ Gu Li, a past national champion, told Chinese state media last week.
‘It would be very hard for Ke to play against it, but then again, Ke has also been working extremely hard to change his methods in preparation.
‘I hope he can play well.’
AI has previously beaten humans in cerebral contests, starting with IBM’s Deep Blue defeating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, but AlphaGo’s win last year is considered the most significant win for AI yet.
The high-profile AlphaGo match comes amid a Chinese government push to compete internationally in artificial intelligence.
Traditional AI methods, which construct a search tree over all possible positions, don’t have a chance when it comes to winning at Go. So DeepMind took a different approach by building a system, AlphaGo, that combines an advanced tree search with deep neural networks.These neural networks take a description of the Go board as an input and process it through 12 different network layers containing millions of neuron-like connections.One neural network called the ‘policy network,’ selects the next move to play, while the other neural network – the ‘value network’ – predicts the winner of the game.’We trained the neural networks on 30 million moves from games played by human experts, until it could predict the human move 57 per cent of the time,’ Google said.The previous record before AlphaGo was 44 per cent. Traditional AI methods, which construct a search tree over all possible positions, don’t have a chance when it comes to winning at Go (pictured)However, Google DeepMind’s goal is to beat the best human players, not just mimic them.To do this, AlphaGo learned to discover new strategies for itself, by playing thousands of games between its neural networks and adjusting the connections using a trial-and-error process known as reinforcement learning.Of course, all of this requires a huge amount of computing power and Google used its Cloud Platform.To put AlphaGo to the test, the firm held a tournament between AlphaGo and the strongest other Go programs, including Crazy Stone and Zen.AlphaGo won every game against these programs.The program then took on reigning three-time European Go champion Fan Hui at Google’s London office.In a closed-doors match last October, AlphaGo won by five games to zero.It was the first time a computer program has ever beaten a professional Go player.
Baidu Inc, China’s leading search firm which is developing projects parallel to Google in search and autonomous driving, in March launched an AI lab in cooperation with China’s National Development and Reform Commission.
Google pulled its search engine from China seven years ago after it refused to self-censor internet searches, a requirement of the Chinese government.
It has since been rendered inaccessible behind the country’s firewall, maintaining only a limited presence through a joint venture in the country.
It previously announced plans to bring some services back to the country, including its app store Google Play.
In March Google announced Chinese users would be able to access the Translate mobile app, marking its most recent success launching a previously banned service.
Like AlphaGo, Translate also uses DeepMind’s artificial intelligence software.
THE HISTORY OF THE GAME OF GO The game of Go originated in China more than 2,500 years ago. Confucius wrote about the game, and it is considered one of the four essential arts required of any true Chinese scholar. Played by more than 40 million people worldwide, the rules of the game are simple. Players take turns to place black or white stones on a board, trying to capture the opponent’s stones or surround empty space to make points of territory. The game is played primarily through intuition and feel and because of its beauty, subtlety and intellectual depth, it has captured the human imagination for centuries. The game of Go (pictured) originated in China more than 2,500 years ago. Confucius wrote about the game, and it is considered one of the four essential arts required of any true Chinese scholarBut as simple as the rules are, Go is a game of profound complexity. 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 – that’s more than the number of atoms in the universe, and more than a googol (10 to the power of 100) times larger than chess.This complexity is what makes Go hard for computers to play and therefore an irresistible challenge to artificial intelligence researchers, who use games as a testing ground to invent smart, flexible algorithms that can tackle problems, sometimes in ways similar to humans.
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