A new era for go
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By Kim Ji-myung
Korea is a latecomer in the global community of go. Called baduk in Korean and weiqi in Chinese, the game is known to have originated from China, like most of the culture and civilization of Asia.
Confucius wrote about weiqi already in the 4th century BCE, to illustrate correct thinking about filial piety and human nature. By the 17th century, enjoying a game of go properly had become one of the Four Accomplishments to be mastered by the literati of Asia, along with calligraphy, painting, and playing the geomungo, a type of Korean zither.
Today, go is more popular in Korea than anywhere else in the world. Some claim that five to ten percent of the population, especially retirees, are regular players.
Korea’s history of professional go playing began when the Korean professional go match system was established in the 1950s, following Cho Nam-chul’s return from training in Japan.
The game bloomed in Korea when Cho Chi-hun, who was among the best players of the late 20th century, won half of Japan’s biggest three tournaments from 1980 to 2000. He was the first player to will all three in the same year. He was named the best player in late 2002 for the most titles in Japan, with 66.
Other major figures of the game include Kim In of the 1970s and Cho Hun-hyun in the 1980s, as well as Cho’s student Lee Chang-ho in the 1990s. However, the current reigning champion is Lee Se-dol, a global master with 47 wins and 18 world championships.
But now there is a new player gaining momentum. But this player is not playing with filial piety or human nature in mind. Rather, it is playing from a purely scientific perspective. That’s because it is a computer program named AlphaGo.
AlphaGo was created by Demis Hassabis, a British AI researcher and CEO of startup DeepMind. This former chess master and video game designer is reported to liken his work of advancing machine brains to leading an “Apollo program for the 21st century.”
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, reportedly described him as one of the smartest human beings on the planet. Hassabis is on a mission to “solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else.” His DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014 for a reported $625 million.
AI, like that which Hassabis designs, is already all around us. Speech and facial recognition and robots with emotions, for example, are part of the technology. In his vision of the future, super-smart machines will work in tandem with human experts to potentially solve anything. “Cancer, climate change, energy, genomics, macroeconomics, financial systems, physics: many of the systems we would like to master are getting so complex,” according to Hassabis.
Hassabis met recently with Stephen Hawking for four hours according to the Guardian. In an interview, he said that Hawking neglected to mention “anything inflammatory about AI” in the press. Most surprisingly, Hawking did not include AI in his list of putative threats to humanity.
“Maybe it helped, hearing more about the practicalities, more about the actual systems we might build and the checks and controls we can have on those,” Hassabis said.
The Lee-AlphaGo match has brought many questions and issues to light. How good are Korean go players on the world stage, anyway? Although people have long known that go is not merely an ordinary pastime, but a time-honored, cerebral strategic game, is it really just a scientific and technological affair?
This is not the first time a human has dueled with an AI in a match of go. In 2015, Fan Hui, the three-time European go champion, lost to AlphaGo 5-0.
As of today, March 12, 2016, Lee has lost two games, with three more to go.
He had been confident of his victory before the game started. The first defeat shocked the world, except Hassabis, not only in the go community but the entire public watching this epoch-making meeting of brains of flesh and metal. Now Lee hopes to win at least out of the remaining three matches.
The two consecutive victories by AlphaGo against Lee have gained recognition from the public that AI has surpassed human intelligence. Yet many Koreans seem flattered to see a young Korean champion representing humanity in the duel with the AI.
2016 will likely go down in history as a milestone of the final match in the rivalry between the competence of men and machine, proclaiming humanity the loser. Maybe this marks an impossible point of no return in the long evolution process of non-human brain competency.
The writer is the chairwoman of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage). Her email address is Heritagekorea21@gmail.com.