Google Passes Go: Wins the 2016 Jeopardy Trophy

January 29, 2016

IBM Watson smoked the humans on Jeopardy. The issue of post production does not halt the Watson PR machine.

Now the Alphabet Google thing has crushed the game of Go, smashing the likes of GnuGo, Fuebo, Pachi, Zen, Crazy Stone, and Fan Hui.

Winning games is one way to demonstrate the seeming magic of smart software.

Navigate to “AlphaGo: Mastering the ancient game of Go with Machine Learning.” The write up from a real live Googler states:

Go is a game of profound complexity. The search space in Go is vast — more than a googol times larger than chess (a number greater than there are atoms in the universe!). As a result, traditional “brute force” AI methods — which construct a search tree over all possible sequences of moves — don’t have a chance in Go. To date, computers have played Go only as well as amateurs. Experts predicted it would be at least another 10 years until a computer could beat one of the world’s elite group of Go professionals.

Profound. Yes.

How “strong” is the Google method, Watson?

Ah, Watson, you don’t have an answer. Google obligingly reveals:

To answer this question, we played a tournament between AlphaGo and the best of the rest – the top Go programs at the forefront of A.I. research. Using a single machine, AlphaGo won all but one of its 500 games against these programs. In fact, AlphaGo even beat those programs after giving them 4 free moves head start at the beginning of each game. A high-performance version of AlphaGo, distributed across many machines, was even stronger.

Net net: Humans are destined to be losers. Humans are inferior. Those Google self driving cars and their “incidents”? Humans are responsible.

Eliminate the human from activities and machine life is much better.

Question: What happens if AlphaGo and Watson hook up and produce some spawn? What if Facebook and Baidu’s smart software join in the fun? Worth making a video of the encounter I assume.

Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2016

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Google, IBM Watson, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.