简体中文
(THE WALL STREET JOURNAL) In the battle to defend humans from another humbling by computers, has mankind got the right representative?
The ancient Chinese game of Go was the last professionally played board game in which top pros were unchallenged by machines. Not any longer.
South Korean grandmaster Lee Se-dol wasbeaten on Wednesday in Seoul in the first gameof a best-of-five Go tournament against AlphaGo, an artificial-intelligence project developed by Google parentAlphabetInc.
“I am in shock. I never thought I would lose,” Mr. Lee said after the match.
Go is a simple looking but hugely complex game using black-and-white counters to win territory on a 19-by-19 grid of lines. It is played by around 40 million people, mostly in East Asia.
It represents a quantum leap for computers from when International Business Machines Corp.’s Deep Blue beat world chess championGarry Kasparovin 1997, and when its Watson supercomputer triumphed over flesh-and-blood contestants in the TV quiz show “Jeopardy” in 2011.
Mathematicians have long studied Go and some say that within just the first 40 moves, there are more possible authorized positions than atoms in the observable universe, a number roughly 80 digits long. In chess, the number of total possible games is roughly 50 digits long, according to some calculations.
The babyfaced 33-year-old Mr. Lee has been on the front of almost every national newspaper as South Korea has become transfixed with what one called “the showdown of the century.”
The downtown hotel where the match is being played has been turned into a Las Vegas Strip hotel on prizefight night, with politicians and other public figures coming and going to soak in the slow-moving action. Go matches typically take several hours; this one took 3½ hours.
Mr. Lee is by far the most successful active Go professional, with 18 world titles since he turned pro in 1995. He has been called theRoger Federerof Go by the Google team. But just like the tennis legend, he has had less success in recent years, winning only one tournament last year.
The rising star of Go is an 18-year-old Chinese player, Ke Jie, who could be compared with tennis’s Novak Djokovic, a younger player who has dominated in the past few years. Mr. Ke is undefeated against Mr. Lee, having beaten him twice this year. In 2015, he became the first player since Mr. Lee to win two world titles in one year.
Mr. Ke made his thoughts known about Mr. Lee’s loss soon after play finished. “AlphaGomay have defeated Lee Se-dol, but it can’t beat me,” he wrote on his Weibo account, aTwitter-like social-media service in China.
Chinese journalists at the Seoul tournament said that while Go fans in China were likely rooting for Mr. Lee, many would rather see Mr. Ke take on the computer.
“Lee Se-dol is already old, and Google knew that. Why didn’t they pick Ke Jie?” wrote one Weibo user. Go players generally peak in their 20s, those in the game say.
TV commentators in South Korea, where many of the main channels jumped back and forth from the game, said Mr. Lee seemed to appear tired toward the latter part of the match. The nation’s biggest news agency sent alerts to smartphones about the defeat.
Demis Hassabis,founder of Google DeepMind, the developer of AlphaGo, said before the tournament that Mr. Lee was the ideal professional to test the program against because of his pedigree, but future matches might include Mr. Ke and other professionals from China and Japan, where Go is also popular.
“We landed it on the moon,” Mr. Hassabis wrote on his Twitter account about the win.
Holding the match against a Korean is also an acknowledgment of how the game has taken off in the country over recent decades, surviving an Internet revolution that has turned South Korea into one of the world’s most wired nations and keeps many glued to their smartphones.
South Korea’s national Go association estimates around 20% of the country’s 52 million people play the game. South Korea has a cable and satellite channel each showing Go games around the clock. One of the most popular TV dramas in recent years revolved around an aspiring Go player who uses the game as a guide to life.
While sometimes viewed here as a game mostly played by older men, the buzz around the Google tournament has increased interest among younger South Koreans. Sales of Go boards and counters among those in their 20s soared more than 80% in February, according to South Korea’s biggest online shopping mall.
Artificial-intelligence experts had estimated last year it would take a decade for a computer to beat a professional Go player. But in October, AlphaGo took on the European champion Fan Hui and won 5-0, stunning the Go world.
Still, many said the jump to challenging top pros in Asia would be too big. Mr. Lee, who is known for his aggressive style of play and introverted character, had said he had no doubt he would be unbeaten in every game against the supercomputer.
He dialed that back a little just before the tournament, saying he wasn’t sure about winning 5-0. After his defeat, he said he rated his chances of series victory at 50-50. “I’ve got more experience than Fan Hui. The loss won’t shake me up,” he said.
Go experts generally agreed Mr. Lee failed to recover from a bad move early in the opening game. “Is he going to bring his A-game tomorrow? He’d better,” saidAndrew Jackson,vice president of operations at the American Go Association.
In 1997, Mr. Kasparov resigned the sixth and final game toIBM’s supercomputer after just 19 moves because he said he “cracked under the pressure” and “lost my fighting spirit.” After the game, he suggested IBM may have cheated by letting humans assist the computer, according to news reports at the time. After IBM’s Watson computer vanquished champion Jeopardy playerKen Jenningsin 2011, Mr. Jennings wrote on his final answer: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”
