IN 1996 IBM challenged Garry Kasparov to a game of chess against one of its computers, Deep Blue. Mr Kasparov, regarded as one of the best-ever players, won—but Deep Blue won the rematch. Two decades on, computers are much better than humans at chess but remain amateurs when it comes to the much tougher, ancient game of Go. Or at least, they did. Now a computer has managed to thrash a top-drawer human player.
The computer used a program, called AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence (AI) company bought by Google in 2014 for $400m. It took on Fan Hui, European Go champion , beating him 5-0, according to a report of the contest in Nature. Beating a champion at Go has long been considered a "grand challenge" in AI research, for the game is far harder for computers than chess. Go players alternately place black or white stones on a grid of 19x19 squares with the aim of occupying the most territory. The size of the board, and the number and complexity of potential moves, make the game impossible to play via brute-force calculation....Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1PEMGh8
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