The News Lens
Translated and compiled by Shin-wei Chang and Bing-sheng Lee
Go, also know as Weiqi, is considered one of the hardest and most complicated
South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol attends at a press conference after the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google’s artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, March 9, 2016. Google’s computer program AlphaGo defeated its human opponent, South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol, on Wednesday in the first game of a historic five-game match between human and computer.(AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
board games in the world. As a result, it has always been a goal for scientists to create an AI to beat world champions in the game.
AlphaGo, an AI developed by Google’s subsidiary company DeepMind, has amazed people around the world with its accomplishments. Last October, it won five games over Fan Hui, a three-time European Go winner.
On March 10, AlphaGo stunned the world again by beating Lee Sedol, a South Korean professional Go player who ranks second in international title, and the AI went on to win two more matches out of the five-game match. As the news spread and was discussed by the technological community, Aja Huang was recognized as the key promoter of the research and development team of AlphaGo. Huang has been described as the one who “instructed” AlphaGo and “designed AlphaGo’s brain.”
Born and raised in Taiwan, Aja Huang completed his PhD in information
South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol, right, puts the first stone against Google’s artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, as Google DeepMind’s lead programmer Aja Huang, left, sits during the Google DeepMind Challenge Match in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, March 9, 2016. Computers eventually will defeat human players of Go, but the beauty of the ancient Chinese game of strategy that has fascinated people for thousands of years will remain, Go world champion Lee said Tuesday. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
engineering at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). Instructed by professor Rémi Coulom and Lin Shun-sii, Huang published his research, “New Heuristics for Monte Carlo Tree Search Applied to the Game of Go,” in 2011.
Based on the research results, Huang predicted that Go programs could beat top human Go players in 10 to 20 years. However, he failed his prediction six years after he published his paper.
In 2010, “Erica,” a Go AI designed by Huang, beat “Zen,” a program that was publicly recognized as the best program at Go. In the same year, Erica even won the gold medal in the 19×19 Go tournament at the 15th Computer Olympiad. [FULL STORY]
