New | Will China’s Go master get the beta of AlphaGo?
Ke Jie, the world’s top Go master, conceded the first game of three against AlphaGo in Wuzhen.
A crucial boundary between human intelligence and the artificial variety may be redrawn this week in the waterfront town of Wuzhen, where humanity’s oldest and most complex game will be played out between a teenager and a three-year-old computer.
Humanity’s mission falls on the shoulders of 19-year-old Ke Jie, the world’s top player of Go, also known as weiqi (圍棋), while the computer will be Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo, arguably the smartest of its kind.
At stake is the boundary where artificial intelligence and machine learning can surpass human endeavour, especially in strategies, plotting and the element of surprise.
“Most people view this as man versus machine, while I disagree,” said DeepMind’s founder and CEO Demis Hassabis at the kickoff of the tournament in Wuzhen. “It is more like men using them as tools to discover new knowledge together.”
A two-person strategy game on a 19 X 19 grid board with black and white stones, weiqi is the most complex competition played by humans, with more possible moves and permutations than the total number of estimated atoms in the visible universe.