Google is to live stream a forthcoming Go match between its AlphaGo AI program and the current world champion on YouTube.
Google’s DeepMind AI team recently made the news when its AlphaGo program handed out a 5-0 thrashing of European Go champ Fan Hui. It was the first time a program has defeated a professional player.
The gauntlet was then thrown down to the current highest-ranked Go player, Lee Sedol of South Korea. The five-game match will take place in Seoul in March, and there’s a whopping great $1 million prize at stake for the winner.
Just to add to the stakes, Google has now revealed that the match will be live streamed on YouTube.
https://twitter.com/statuses/695379217870008321
Go is considered a much trickier game than chess for a computer program to master, owing to its complex levels of strategy and high number of potential scenarios.
The victory of the AlphaGo program over Fan Hui attracted a great deal of attention in the scientific community, and lead to a paper in the prominent science journal Nature.
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“If we win the match in March, then that’s sort of the equivalent of beating Kasparov in chess,” project lead Demis Hassabis told reporters in a press briefing on the Nature paper (via VentureBeat).
“Lee Sedol is the greatest player of the past decade. I think that would mean AlphaGo would be better than any human at playing Go. Go is the ultimate game in AI research.”
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.