A computer yesterday defeated China’s top player of the ancient board game go in the latest test of whether artificial intelligence (AI) can master one of the last games that machines have yet to dominate.
Ke Jie (柯潔), a 19-year-old prodigy, is due to play a three-game match against AlphaGo in Wuzhen, west of Shanghai.
During the five-day event, the computer is also to face off against other top-ranked Chinese players.
AlphaGo beat Ke by a half-point, “the closest margin possible,” according to Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, the Google-owned company that developed AlphaGo.
“AlphaGo wins game 1!” said Hassabis on Twitter. “Ke Jie fought bravely and some wonderful moves were played.”
Go, which originated in China more than 25 centuries ago, has avoided mastery by machines even as computers surpassed humans in most other games. They conquered chess in 1997 when IBM Corp’s Deep Blue system defeated champion Garry Kasparov.
Go, known as weiqi (圍棋) in China and baduk in Korea, is considered more challenging because the near-infinite number of possible positions requires intuition and flexibility.
Players take turns putting white or black stones on a rectangular grid with 361 intersections, trying to surround larger areas of the board while also capturing each other’s pieces. Competitors play until both agree there are no more places to put stones or one quits.
Players had expected it to be at least another decade before computers could beat the best humans due to go’s complexity and reliance on intuition, but AlphaGo surprised them in 2015 by beating a European champion. Last year, it defeated South Korea’s top player, Lee Sedol.
AlphaGo was designed to mimic such intuition in tackling complex tasks. Google officials said they want to apply those technologies to areas such as smartphone assistants and solving real-world problems.
Human players were startled when AlphaGo scored its first major upset in October 2015 by defeating a European champion.
AlphaGo defeated Lee in four out of five games during a weeklong match in March last year.
Lee lost the first three games, then came back to win the fourth, after which he said he took advantages of weaknesses including AlphaGo’s poor response to surprises.
Go is hugely popular in Asia, with tens of millions of players in Taiwan, China, Japan and the two Koreas.
Google said a broadcast of Lee’s match with AlphaGo was watched by a about 280 million people.
Players have said AlphaGo enjoys some advantages because it does not get tired or emotionally rattled, two critical aspects of the mentally intense game.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung (袁國勇) has done battle with some of the world’s worst threats, including the SARS virus he helped isolate and identify, and he has a warning. Another pandemic is inevitable and could exact damage far worse than COVID-19 pandemic, said the soft-spoken scientist sometimes thought of as Hong Kong’s answer to former US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci. “Both the public and [world] leaders must admit that another pandemic will come, and probably sooner than you anticipate,” he said at the city’s Queen Mary Hospital, where he works and teaches. “Why I make such a horrifying prediction
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
INDICTED: US prosecutors said Sue Mi Terry accepted fancy handbags, luxury dinners and thousands of dollars in payments from South Korean intelligence A former CIA employee and senior official at the US National Security Council has been charged with allegedly serving as a secret agent for the South Korean National Intelligence Service, the US Department of Justice said. Sue Mi Terry accepted luxury goods, including fancy handbags, and expensive dinners at sushi restaurants in exchange for advocating South Korean government positions during media appearances, sharing nonpublic information with intelligence officers and facilitating access for South Korean officials to US government officials, an indictment filed in federal court in Manhattan, New York, says. She also admitted to the FBI that she served as a source