AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol (Photo : Twitter)
Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence (AI) software will take on the world's best Go player later this year. AlphaGo will compete against China's Ke Jie, who is the ranked number one among the world's top Go grandmasters. The 18-year-old first told the news media that he did not want to play the supercomputer because it was a weaker player and would use machine learning to copy his playing style, but has changed his mind.
Ke had originally claimed that he could defeat AlphaGo. The AI machine beat Go grandmaster Lee Sedol 4-1 earlier this year, which was followed by Lee's South Korea investing $860 million in AI technology.
The announcement of the man vs. machine contest was made at the 37th World Amateur Go Championship in Wuxi, China last weekend. It was made by a Chinese Go Association spokesman.
Supercomputers have been taking on top human players for two decades. IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov by 3.5-2.5 in May 1997, then the tech giant's Watson beat two former Jeopardy! champs in 2011.
AlphaGo's victory over Lee was a big event because Go has a higher number of possible board scenarios than chess. Since then other players have challenged AlphaGo including a Chinese newspaper's engineers.
Ke defeated Lee earlier this year to become the world's top-ranked Go player, according to Gizmodo. However, Lee's moniker is the "Roger Federer of Go" because he is a more experienced player of the Chinese board game.
The skill level of Ke and Lee is about the same as both are 9th dan players. However, it is unknown if Ke can defeat AlphaGo or top Lee's one victory against the AI machine.
Dennis Hassabis is co-founder of Google's DeepMind. He released a statement noting that the match between AlphaGo and Ke is not official yet.
In related news, messaging app Slack could talk back to its three million users in the future via an AI system, according to Recode.
Noah Weiss is Slack's head of search. He shared that the Slack app will talk to people in a more complex way than today's software bots, and will figure out people's day-to-day needs like a personal assistant.
Here's a video about Google DeepMind's AlphaGo:
