Way To Go - Machine Outclasses Go Champion

(RTTNews) - Yet another milestone has been carved in artificial intelligence research - with a computer program defeating a human professional player in the ancient game of Go, which is considered to be more complex than Chess.

As you may know, the man-machine match between the world Chess champion Garry Kasparov and IBM computer program called Deep Blue in 1997 made headlines worldwide. Deep Blue outclassed the world Chess champion Kasparov in a 6-game series, which resulted in two wins for Deep Blue, one for the champion and three draws.

Computers have surpassed human experts in a variety of board games like noughts and crosses, Draughts, Othello (Reversi), Scrabble and Jeopardy. The only game that computers have been incapable of beating even amateurs until now is Go, a board game invented over 2,500 years ago in China. But not anymore.

AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google DeepMind, has defeated the European Go champion, Fan Hui, by 5 games to 0.

This is the first time that a computer program has defeated a human professional player in the full-sized game of Go, a feat previously thought to be at least a decade away, say the researchers.

Next up for AlphaGo is a five-game challenge match against the legendary Go-player Lee Sedol, who is considered the best in the world, which will be held in Seoul in March.

The paper titled "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search" is published in Nature.