I ran across this article from the Daily Mail. I think Quinn, the protagonist in Hard Wired, would get a kick out of it.
The only human to outsmart Google’s AlphaGo in a game of Go decides to retire and says artificial intelligence ‘cannot be defeated’
There’s no shortage of questions surrounding artificial intelligence, but one thing is indisputable: AI is really good at Go. So good, in fact, that it’s sent Lee So-dol, a former world champion and 9-dan Go master, into retirement after he realized artificial intelligence programs have become effectively unbeatable.
“With the debut of AI in Go games, I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts,” he said after announcing his retirement. “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”
So-dol is the only human to have ever beaten AlphaGo, the dominant AI program developed by Google’s DeepMind.
At the time, So-dol’s lone victory was a hopeful achievement, but in retrospect he believes it was due to a bug in AlphaGo and not his own skill.
“Frankly, I had sensed kind of a defeat even before the start of the matches against AlphaGo,” he told South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency. “People from Google’s DeepMind Technologies looked very confident from the beginning.”
The game of Go originated in China more than 2,500 years ago. Confucius wrote about the game, and it is considered one of the four essential arts required of any true Chinese scholar. Played by more than 40 million people worldwide, the rules of the game are simple.
Players take turns to place black or white stones on a board, trying to capture the opponent’s stones or surround empty space to make points of territory.
The game is played primarily through intuition and feel and because of its beauty, subtlety and intellectual depth, it has captured the human imagination for centuries.
But as simple as the rules are, Go is a game of profound complexity. There are 1057 possible positions – that’s more than the number of atoms in the universe, and more than a googol (10 to the power of 100) times larger than chess.
This complexity is what makes Go hard for computers to play and therefore an irresistible challenge to artificial intelligence researchers, who use games as a testing ground to invent smart, flexible algorithms that can tackle problems, sometimes in ways similar to humans.
Since then, a number of Go-playing AI have been developed and become only more dominant, including the Chinese AI called Fine Art, and a South Korean Go AI called HanDol. These programs have become so dominant even masters like So-dol are given a two-piece advantage at the start of each game to keep from getting blown out.
So-dol will commemorate his retirement with one final match in December, against HanDol.
“Even with a two-stone advantage, I feel like I will lose the first game to HanDol,” he said.
“These days, I don’t follow Go news.I wanted to play comfortably against HanDol as I have already retired, though I will do my best.”