'North Korea was once AI powerhouse'

By Kang Seung-woo

North Korea’s AI Go program Eunbyul

North Korea had made substantial progress in the technology development of artificial intelligence (AI), according to a recent report, Tuesday.

However, massive economic sanctions on Pyongyang for defying the international community’s resolutions have prevented it from further improving the technology, it added.

According to the report from the Korea Development Bank Future Strategy Institute, the totalitarian country started developing AI in 1990, with some tangible improvements, and it divided its research organization into four sections in 2015.

The report cited the North’s AI go program Eunbyul and voice-recognition software Ryongnamsan as notable achievements.

Eunbyul, developed by the Korea Computer Center in 1997, had been a dominant player in international competitions of the Asian board game until 2010.

Starting with its first win in 1998, it topped the World Computer Go Championship from 2003 to 2006. It also won in the 2009 event.

It used the so-called Monte Carlo methods just as Google DeepMind’s computer program AlphaGo had done, but a lack of further technical support led the North Korean go program to lose its dominance. The Monte Carlo methods are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. Statisticians use them widely.

Eunbyul used 16 CPUs in 2010, while AlphaGo had 1,920 CPUs and 280 GPUs in its match against Korea’s Lee Se-dol in March 2016. In the five-match event, AlphaGo defeated human champion Lee 4-1, stunning the world.

The North also came up with Ryongnamsan, voice assistance software similar to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. However, its hardware is equivalent to that of a business personal computer. As a result, it failed to compete with Siri or Alexa.

The report also said the North is pushing for the development of software for facial and fingerprint recognition.

However, the country is not likely to reach its goals.

“To secure the latest AI technologies, the North is required to make massive investment in hardware and software,” it said.

“However, cash-strapped North Korea is expected to hit a wall in developing the technologies.”

Due to its missile launches and nuclear tests, the United Nations Security Council has slapped the Kim Jong-un regime with strict economic sanctions.

The North is banned from testing any ballistic missile technology under a set of U.N. resolutions but it has repeatedly violated these.