Artificial Intelligence
Demis Hassabis of Google's DeepMind hinted recently that his research team may have a "surprise" coming with regards to Go in a few months. Could they have solved the centuries old game that has so far remained so difficult?
In a recent interview with the Royal Society of London, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis dropped a big hint about what the company that has amazed analysts recently with its machine learning software is working on.
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“Maybe you will have a surprise about Go?” Hassabis’s interviewer asked (see full interview below).Hassabis replies. “I can’t talk about it yet, but in a few months I think there will be quite a big surprise.”
In the field of artificial intelligence, the centuries old game Go remains a huge hurdle to overcome. It is one of the few remaining areas where human superiority over computers remains strong. No system has ever beaten a top human Go player — at least not without a huge helping hand.
"Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard... all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Like chess, Go is a deterministic perfect information game. No information is hidden from either player, and there is no elements of chance, that make up other games like Coup― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
. As with chess, Go is an analogy for war between two sides.Play starts with an empty board, where players alternate the placement of black and white stones, attempting to surround territory while avoiding capture by the enemy. On the surface it may seem simpler than chess, but it’s not.
When IBM's Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov at chess in 1996, the best Go programs couldn’t even challenge a decent amateur. Since then, even with huge computing advances, the solution of expert-level Go remains one of AI’s greatest unsolved riddles.
The mysteries and complexity of the game-play in Go were studied by Alan Turing and I.J. Good, who even wrote a 1965 article for New Scientist entitled “The Mystery of Go.”
The race is now on to create artificial intelligence that can beat Go. Facebook has announced they have a team working on the 19x19 problem.
Hassabis has already proven himself an expert game solver and creator. He was a chess prodigy as a child and went on to create best-selling video games in his teens before really applying himself by picking up a PhD in Neuroscience, forming DeepMind, and selling the company to Google for hundreds of millions of dollars.
The snippets of deep learning development the UK-based team has released so far have been very interesting, including self-learning systems that can learn and conquer 1980's video games on their own. DeepMind has combined deep learning with a technique called reinforcement learning. Their software learns by taking actions and receiving feedback on their effects, as humans or animals often do.
Solving Go represents a monumental leap for artificial intelligence development. The game is an act of strategy and thinking about the future—thinking about what’s going to happen next. Getting computers to do this in a similar way essentially means they are closer to acting like human intelligence.
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