Facebook in preparation of AI capable of learn to play ‘Go’

By Park Sae-jin Posted : January 28, 2016, 14:19 Updated : January 28, 2016, 14:19

Screenshot of Facebook's Go AI[Courtesy of Facebook]



Facebook is in a development of special artificial intelligence (AI). It’s not just an ordinary AI used in everyday life, but it is specialized to a game of “Go”, a board game which had been very popular for centuries in Korea, China and Japan.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced via his Facebook that the company had been working on the AI since last year. He said that the scientists are very close to teaching computers to win at Go.

“In the past six months, we've built an AI that can make moves in as fast as 0.1 seconds and still be as good as previous systems that took years to build.” Mr. Zuckerberg said, “Our AI combines a search-based approach that models every possible move as the game progresses along with a pattern matching system built by our computer vision team.”

According to the CEO, Go is one of the very last games which the best human players can beat the best AI players.

However, in the meantime, it won’t take long to find out if Mr. Zuckerberg’s thoughts are true. The world champion of Go, Lee Sedol, is to make a historic one-million-dollar match against Google’s AI “DeepMind” in March.

When asked how he felt after accepting a challenge from an AI, Mr. Lee said "I have heard that Google DeepMind's AI is surprisingly strong and getting stronger, but I am confident that I can win at least this time.”

Yang Jae-ho, the secretary general of the Korea Baduk (Go) Association also thinks that the AI may win a few games because Lee is not experienced in competing against a computer. But the match winner will be Lee, he said.

AI had been dominating over human minds in board games. A Victory by an AI against the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, which shocked the world, is one of the very first AI to defeat a world class pro board game player.

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