Ready, Set: A.I. Challenges Human Champion at World’s Hardest Game.

On March 9, humankind will play a very important game.

That’s the day Lee Sedol, world champion Go player, will square off against an artificial intelligence opponent in a series of matches in Seoul, South Korea.

It’s a heavyweight showdown that’s being compared to the famous 1997 matchup between chess champion Garry Kasparov and IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue. That competition — which Deep Blue won three games to two (with one draw) — was a seismic event in the history of technology. It suggested that supercomputers had surpassed humans in one of our greatest intellectual pursuits.

In many ways, the upcoming Go match is even more significant.

For one thing, Go — the 2,500-year-old Chinese strategy game played with colored stones — is more mathematically complex than chess, by several orders of magnitude. It’s generally considered to be the world’s oldest and most difficult board game.

There’s also the fact that AlphaGo — the name that Google’s DeepMind team has given to its Go-playing supercomputer — essentially taught itself to master the game. Thanks to deep-learning techniques and artificial neural network technology, AlphaGo is a kind of 21st-century digital autodidact. Computer scientists didn’t spend years programming the A.I. with customized algorithms, as with Deep Blue and chess. Instead, AlphaGo programmed itself.


How it works

To learn the game, the AlphaGo system was provided with a database of 30 million moves as played by human experts. That might seem like a lot, but 30 million is actually a minuscule fraction of the total number of moves possible in a game of Go.

After that, the computer played against itself — thousands of times — until the A.I. was able to grasp the game’s higher-level subtleties and dynamics.

“Traditional A.I. methods, which construct a search tree over all possible positions, don’t have a chance in Go,” wrote Google researcher Demis Hassabis, in a blog post accompanying news of the AlphaGo initiative. “So when we set out to crack Go, we took a different approach. We built a system … 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.”

The breakthrough was significant and surprisingly abrupt. For decades, Go-playing computer programs had been unable to improve themselves past the human amateur level. Professional human players consistently dominated when playing against computers.

AlphaGo arrived on the scene like a supergenius prodigy. When Google matched its system against the other top Go-playing A.I. in a 500-game virtual tournament, AlphaGo went 499-1. Its next bout was even more impressive: Last year, AlphaGo defeated European Go champion Fan Hui 5-0. It was the first time a computer program had ever defeated a professional human Go player.

March’s competition against the world champion is seen as the ultimate test. Sedol is widely considered the best Go player in the world over the past decade. The seven-day match in March will be broadcast live, with a $1 million prize at stake.


By Glenn McDonald.
Culled from Yahoo News.