Artificial
intelligence: Google's AlphaGo beats Go master Lee Se-dol
12 March 2016
Google's AlphaGo program was playing
against Lee Se-dol in Seoul , in South Korea .
Mr Lee had been confident he would win
before the competition started.
The Chinese board game is considered to be
a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess.
"AlphaGo played consistently from
beginning to the end while Lee, as he is only human, showed some mental
vulnerability," one of Lee's former coaches, Kwon Kap-Yong, told the AFP
news agency. Mr Lee is considered a champion Go player, having won numerous professional
tournaments in a long, successful career.
Go is a game of two players who take turns putting black or white stones on a 19-by-19 grid. Players win by taking control of the most territory on the board, which they achieve by surrounding their opponent's pieces with their own.
In the first game of the series, AlphaGo
triumphed by a very narrow margin - Mr Lee had led for most of the match, but
AlphaGo managed to build up a strong lead in its closing stages.
After losing the second match to Deep Mind,
Lee Se-dol said he was "speechless" adding that the AlphaGo machine
played a "nearly perfect game". The two experts who provided
commentary for the YouTube stream of for the third game said that it had been a
complicated match to follow.
They said that Lee Se-dol had brought his "top game" but that AlphaGo had won "in great style". The AlphaGo system was developed by British computer company DeepMind which was bought by Google in 2014. It has built up its expertise by studying older games and teasing out patterns of play. And, according to DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis, it has also spent a lot of time just playing the game.
"It played itself, different versions of itself, millions and millions of times and each time got incrementally slightly better - it learns from its mistakes," he told the BBC before the matches started. This virtuous circle of constant improvement meant the super computer went into the five-match series stronger than when it beat the European champion late last year.
Then the goal posts moved. The critics said
chess was beyond competing capability because it needed human intuition and creativity.
Critics claimed a horizon where computers
might beat some professionals but certainly not grand masters. Humans have
limited memory and need brilliant pattern perception
and creative strategies to win.
So the critics turned to Go as the impossible. Even with today's vast computer memories and incredibly fast processors (which have doubled more than eight times since Deep Blue), the ancient game will not yield to brute force. The size of the search required for Go is larger than chess by more than the number of atoms in the universe.
When Facebook announced earlier this year
that their program had beaten a strong Go amateur,
jaws dropped in the AI community - and fell to the floor that same day when
Google's Deep Mind genius team announced their AlphaGo beat the European
champion 5-0.
To beat one of the world's top players,
Deep Mind used a mixture of clever strategies to make the search much smaller.
They trained their machine on 30 million expert moves to start with, and then
the learning machine played against itself millions of times. It worked - the
holy grail is in the bag and the goal posts can shift no further.
Does this mean AI is now smarter than us
and will kill us mere humans? Certainly not. AlphaGo doesn't care if it wins or
loses. It doesn't even care if it plays and it certainly couldn't make you a
cup of tea after the game. Does it mean that AI will soon take your job?
Possibly you should be more worried about that.
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35785875
Key words:
1.executive (n.) 主管
2.incrementally (adv.) 增值地
3.intuition (n.) 直覺
4.perception (n.) 觀念,看法,認識
5.amateur (n.) 業餘愛好者
Key words:
1.executive (n.) 主管
2.incrementally (adv.) 增值地
3.intuition (n.) 直覺
4.perception (n.) 觀念,看法,認識
5.amateur (n.) 業餘愛好者
Structure of the Lead:
WHO- AlphaGo, Lee
Se-do
WHEN- 12 March 2016
WHAT- The Chinese
board game
WHY- Not mentioned
WHERE- Seoul, in South Korea
HOW- AlphaGo
beat Lee Se-do 4-1