AlphaGo: Google's artificial intelligence to take on world champion of ancient Chinese board game

Topic:Robotics

Posted Tue 8 Mar 2016 at 9:12pmTue 8 Mar 2016 at 9:12pm, updated Wed 9 Mar 2016 at 8:18pmWed 9 Mar 2016 at 8:18pm

Single-convex stones and bowls made of jujube wood, used to play Go. — Go has been around for 3,000 years and is said to be the most complex game ever. (Davou/Commons)

Google's artificial intelligence (AI) software is being put to the test in Korea, with a marathon battle against the world's top player of "the most complex game ever designed".

The 3,000-year-old Chinese board game is said to have more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the Universe.

"If the machine wins, it will be an important symbolic moment," AI expert Jean-Gabriel Ganascia of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris told AFP news agency.

"Until now, the game of Go has been problematic for computers as there are too many possible moves to develop an all-encompassing database of possibilities, as for chess."

Google's AlphaGo program has already beaten the European Go champion, Fan Hui.

The machine will now be put to the ultimate test in a five-day tournament in Seoul starting March 9, against South Korean Lee Se-dol, who has held the world crown for a decade.

Game-playing is a crucial measure of AI progress — it shows that a machine can execute a certain "intellectual" task better than the humans who created it.

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Key moments have included IBM's Deep Blue defeating chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997 and the Watson super-computer outwitting humans in the TV quiz show Jeopardy in 2011.

AlphaGo is different to its predecessors, as it is partly self-taught — having played millions of games against itself after initial programming to hone its tactics through trial and error.

"AlphaGo is really more interesting than either Deep Blue or Watson, because the algorithms it uses are potentially more general-purpose," Nick Bostrom, from Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, said.

It is able to predict a winner from each move, thus reducing the search base to manageable levels — something co-creator David Silver has described as "more akin to imagination".

Ahead of the tournament Mr Lee said he felt privileged to be able to play AlphaGo, but was confident he would beat the machine.