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posted by cmn32480 on Friday January 06 2017, @09:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the skynet-has-begun dept.

AlphaGo has won another 50 games against the world's top Go players, this time with little fanfare:

DeepMind's AlphaGo is back, and it's been secretly crushing the world's best Go players over the past couple of weeks. The new version of the AI has played 51 games online and won 50 of them, including a victory against Ke Jie, currently the world's best human Go player. Amusingly, the 51st game wasn't even a loss; it was drawn after the Internet connection dropped out. [...] Following its single game loss [in a match against Lee Sedol], DeepMind has been hard at work on a new and improved version of AlphaGo—and it appears the AI is back bigger, better, and more undefeated than ever. DeepMind's co-founder Demis Hassabis announced on Twitter yesterday that "the new version of AlphaGo" had been playing "some unofficial online games" on the Tygem and FoxGo servers under the names Magister (P) and Master (P). It played 51 games in total against some of the world's best players, including Ke Jie, Gu Li, and Lee Sedol—and didn't lose a single one.

That isn't to say that AlphaGo's unofficial games went unnoticed, though. Over the last week, a number of forum threads have popped up to discuss this mystery debutante who has been thrashing the world's best players. Given its unbeaten record and some very "non-human" moves, most onlookers were certain that Master and Magister were being played by an AI—they just weren't certain if it was AlphaGo, or perhaps another AI out of China or Japan. It is somewhat unclear, but it seems that DeepMind didn't warn the opponents that they were playing against AlphaGo. Perhaps they were told after their games had concluded, though. Ali Jabarin, a professional Go player, apparently bumped into Ke Jie after he'd been beaten by the AI: "He [was] a bit shocked... just repeating 'it's too strong.'"

Will there still be "Go celebrities" once DeepMind has finished mopping the floor with them and turned their attention elsewhere?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Friday January 06 2017, @06:06PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 06 2017, @06:06PM (#450320) Journal

    Go is so complex that, unlike chess, all moves CANNOT be determined.

    I don't think I have ever read anything about GO having infinite moves.

    I think you are talking about different things.

    Even though Go by definition can't have infinite moves, that's doesn't mean that all the moves (and their value interpretations) are actually able to be determined by any known technology during the lifetime of a given human player/opponent--under which condition the moves aren't infinite, but still can't be determined.

    The wise folks over at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go [wikipedia.org] give the following observations about AI trouble with just the endgame to illustrate some of the difficulty involved:

    [A]lthough elaborate study has been conducted, Go endgames have been proven to be PSPACE-hard. There are many reasons why they are so hard... [For example, the] endgame may involve many other aspects of Go, including 'life and death', which are also known to be NP-hard... Thus, it is very unlikely that it will be possible to program a reasonably fast algorithm for playing the Go endgame flawlessly, let alone the whole Go game.

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