Machine Invasion. Human Outsmarted?

From American Go Association newsletter,

COMPUTER BEATS PRO AT U.S. GO CONGRESS: In a historic achievement, the MoGo computer program defeated Myungwan Kim 8P (l) Thursday afternoon by 1.5 points in a 9-stone game billed as “Humanity’s Last Stand?” “It played really well,” said Kim, who estimated MoGo’s current strength at “two or maybe three dan,” though he noted that the program – which used 800 processors, at 4.7 Ghz, 15 Teraflops on a borrowed European supercomputer – “made some 5-dan moves,” …

Complete writing is here.

The game of chess has long been conquered and mastered by machines, and now they are eyeing on even greater problem domain, the game of Go ! But dont worry, the computers will not conquer the earth and enslave us in the near future just yet. That’s because of the nature of AI discipline, which focuses more on narrowly defined problem space, with limited rules. At least I never heard of any successful general-purpose AI machine, or even existence of any such project.

By the way, it was a 9-stone handicap game, meaning that the computer was allowed to move 9 times before the human made his first. The positions of these handicap stones are usually predetermined to spread evenly over the board. So yea, humans are still that much better than machines in Go.

Kim estimated that MoGo’s strength is about 2 or 3 dan (amateur) which I further estimate to be about the level of average amateur go players who play and study the game consistently for 1-3 years. And this same performance is achieved by hardware of 15 Teraflops, or 15,000,000,000,000 floating point operation per second. I am very curious as to what techniques of AI are involved in a computer go program. In fact I’ve already downloaded open source gnugo project, although being slightly demotivated by its size. Haizzz.. so huge, where to find time to study :( .

By the way, from Artificial Intelligence : A Guide to Intelligent System by Michael Negnevitsky, I read that

1. Human brain memory capacity is 10^18 bits.
2. Human brain processing power is 10^15 bits per second.

Well, maybe that explain subconscious memory, dreams, and so on ? After all, we only remember 0.1% of what we know on every second, with others somewhere in the background. (”Remember”, for me, means “being processed”).

Anyway, that above book on Artificial Intelligence is superb, really excellent with good review from many other readers. I have only read the first chapter, and did not fall asleep despite having no reason whatsoever to learn AI. OK, maybe I am not qualified to review that book since I’ve only read one chapter out of nine. But a technical book that keeps you wanting to read even after 24 pages, isn’t it good ?