Monster Machine Cracks the Game of Go
This is huge news and a big breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence research.
A computer program has defeated a master of the ancient Chinese game of Go, achieving one of the loftiest of the Grand Challenges of AI at least a decade earlier than anyone had thought possible.
The programmers, at Google’s Deep Mind laboratory, in London, write in today’s issue of Nature that their program AlphaGo defeated Fan Hui, the European Go champion, 5 games to nil, in a match held last October in the company’s offices. Earlier, the program had won 494 out of 495 games against the best rival Go programs.
AlphaGo’s creators now hope to seal their victory at a 5-game match against Lee Se-dol, the best Go player in the world. That match, for a $1 million prize fund, is scheduled to take place in March in Seoul, South Korea.
The program’s victory marks the rise not merely of the machines but of new methods of computer programming based on self-training neural networks. In support of their claim that this method can be applied broadly, the researchers cited their success, which we reported a year ago, in getting neural networks to learn how to play an entire set of video games from Atari. Future applications, they say, may include financial trading, climate modeling and medical diagnosis.