Computer Go Player Defeats Top Human Player [EvolutionBlog]

For about a year in graduate school, I was a serious Go player. I read a few books and even played in a tournament. It’s a beautiful game, no question about it, but after wasting so much time just to become a mediocre chess player, I eventually decided not to repeat the process with Go.

One thing I noticed, though, was that Go players were constantly comparing their game to chess. In particular, they were really keen on the idea that Go was more complex than chess. They liked to point out that computers were competitive with the top human chess players (and are now superior to them), but the top Go programs were no challenge for the top human Go players.

Now, as far as I’m concerned both games are plenty complex and beautiful. But it still gave me a little satisfaction to read this:

In a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, a computing system developed by Google researchers in Great Britain has beaten a top human player at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern contest of strategy and intuition that has bedeviled AI experts for decades.

Machines have topped the best humans at most games held up as measures of human intellect, including chess, Scrabble, Othello, even Jeopardy!. But with Go—a 2,500-year-old game that’s exponentially more complex than chess—human grandmasters have maintained an edge over even the most agile computing systems. Earlier this month, top AI experts outside of Google questioned whether a breakthrough could occur anytime soon, and as recently as last year, many believed another decade would pass before a machine could beat the top humans.

But Google has done just that. “It happened faster than I thought,” says Rémi Coulom, the French researcher behind what was previously the world’s top artificially intelligent Go player.

Ha! Take that Go snobs!

Incidentally, top Go players are not usually referred to as grandmasters. That’s a chess term. Go typically uses a different system of ranks and titles.

I’m also skeptical about claims that Go is exponentially more complex than chess. That’s based on combinatorial calculations of the total number of possible games in Go versus chess. But a large percentage of legal games are ones that would be dismissed as absurd by even amateur players. So the raw number of possibilities is not necessarily a good measure of complexity.

Which is why I am happy to say they are both plenty complex, and just leave it at that!