A computer program developed by Google took an unassailable 3-0 lead in a best-of-five match with a Go grandmaster on Saturday.
The Chinese board game is considered to be much more complex than chess – there are a far greater number of outcomes – and the victory by the program, AlphaGo, is being a hailed as a stark demonstration of the rapidly growing power of modern artificial intelligence. AlphaGo took only four hours to achieve its third consecutive win over Lee Se-dol, one of the ancient game’s greatest modern players.
Lee, who has topped the world ranking for much of the last decade and holds 18 international titles, had predicted an easy victory when accepting the challenge. Now he finds himself fighting to avoid a whitewash in the two remaining games, on Sunday and Tuesday.
“I don’t know what to say, but I think I have to express my apologies first,” a crestfallen Lee said. “I kind of felt powerless,” he said, acknowledging he had misjudged his opponent. “I have extensive experience in playing Go but there was never a case where I was under this much pressure … and I was incapable of overcoming it,” he said.
Go is a game for two. Players take turns putting black or white stones on a 19-by-19 grid. The winner is the player who surrounds more territory than his or her opponent. Skill at Go requires an ability in dealing with abstract strategic concepts and for AlphaGo’s creators, Google DeepMind, the victory demonstrates that AI has now come of age. “To be honest, we are a bit stunned and speechless,” DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told reporters after the victory.
In the past, the British AI researcher has described Go as “a bit of a holy grail for AI research”, though he stressed on Saturday that Lee’s defeat in Seoul should not be seen as a loss for humanity. “Our hope is that in the long run we will be able to use these techniques for many other problems,” Hassabis said.
These applications could include making phones even smarter and “helping scientists solve some of the world’s biggest challenges in healthcare and other areas.”
The last famous scalp to be taken by AI programs came in 1997 when the IBM-developed supercomputer Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov. However, AlphaGo’s victory goes far beyond that achievement and was achieved by adopting “general” or multi-purpose, rather than “narrow”, task-specific intelligence. This is the ultimate goal in AI – to mimic human reasoning and, crucially, self-learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment