It seems that the time has come when computers can outsmart humans in video games. This was recently proven when the Go champion in Europe was beaten by a program created by Google.
AlphaGo, a Deepmind Google program, has recently defeated Fan Hui, the current European Go champion five games to zero. The software's triumph is quite unexpected since many experts believed that it would only happen after another 10 years.
Creating software to master the game of Go was regarded as a feat by scientist working on artificial intelligence.
They have been working in the development of AI and by the 1990's, computer programs were becoming proficient in playing backgammon. Rapid development continued and by 1997, AI programs were so efficient that world chess champion Gary Kasparov was beaten by IBM's Deep Blue computer in 1997.
"The technical idea that underlies it is the idea of reinforcement learning - getting computers to learn to improve their behavior to achieve goals," said Prof. Zoubin Ghahramani, of the University of Cambridge.
"That could be used for decision-making problems - to help doctors make treatment plans, for example, in businesses or anywhere where you'd like to have computers assist humans in decision making," he added.
The Game of Go is a more complicated chess version that originated in ancient China. Some say it is the most complicated board game in existence. The rules of the game are really simple. However, each player has around 200 moves per game as compared to just 20 in the traditional chess game.
Scientists at the Deepmind division of Google say that the possible positions in Go is more in numbers than all the atoms in the universe. It then makes sense why Demis Hassabis, founder of Deepmind Technologies, said that "Go is the pinnacle of board game challenges."
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