People have always been fascinated by how advanced computers can become, namely how close to the human brain can computers simulate. Today, Google’s AlphaGO, besting the three-time European Go (baduk) champion Fan Hui, AI, or artificial intelligence, has crossed another landmark in emulating the human mind.

Back in 1997, IMB reached a milestone when its program, Deep Blue, beat the chess wizard, Gary Kaparov. This was a breakthrough in computing as the software had to go beyond merely calculating the probabilities and choosing the best option. In the game of chess, there are 35 legal moves at each turn with about 80 turns per game. Thus it is almost impossible to enumerate every move in a timely manner to carry on a match. IBM’s Deep Blue solved this by approaching the game not only from the perspective of probability, but also from selective search. This is to say that the computer made value decisions given the information available.

However, in Go (baduk), the complexity is exponentially higher as there are many more possible moves with the game requiring many more turns than chess. For example, rather than 35 legal moves as in chess, Go has 250 and the game typically requires 150 turns as opposed to 80. This means that the computer must be able to rank enormous amount of possibilities if it were to base its decision just on probability.

As this is an impossible task, Google’s AlphGo had to utilize a model that simulates the human brain’s process of learning and making decisions. David Silver, the co-lead researcher on AlphGo’s program, DeepMind, described this as “looking ahead by playing out the game in its imagination, many times over.” In other words, it had to truly think about its moves by learning from its successes as well as its failures.

The next challenge for AlphaGo is its match against Lee Se-dol, the current world champion in Go. Mr. Lee has remarked, “regardless of the result, it will be a meaningful event in baduk (the Korean name for Go) history. I heard Google Deep Mind’s AI is surprisingly strong and getting stronger, but I am confident that I can win at least this time.” It will be truly exciting to see the result of this rivalry.

<Brennan Lee, Harvard-Westlake, 11th Grade>