First, apologies for not writing very many posts this month. I have minor hardware issues. The power cable for my laptop is not working any more and I have ordered a new one, but it hasn’t arrived yet. So for the last week I have been turning on my laptop very sparingly, to conserve the charge it has on it. I can still get on the Internet, write my blog, etc., from my Mac, but I don’t have Chessbase (because Chessbase isn’t made for the Mac) and that means less ability to upload game positions. I could use Shredder but the appearance would be different from usual, so I prefer not to do that.
So partly due to my own stubbornness, I am limited to topics that don’t require any graphics. But I have a good one today!
As some of you may have heard, Google has developed a go-playing program called Alpha Go, which has challenged one of the world’s top professional go players, Lee Sedol, to a five-game match beginning on March 8. To chess players, there is a certain amount of deja vu here. Will this be like the Garry Kasparov – Deep Blue match in 1997? Or will it be more like the 1996 match, which Kasparov won fairly easily?
One thing seems sure: the computers are coming. Go has long been considered the most difficult human game for a computer to master, and until recently people were saying that it would still be at least ten years before a computer could challenge a human professional (let alone one of the top players) on even terms. But AlphaGo has radically altered the battlefield, with a 5-0 victory in October over the European go champion, Fan Hui.
To me, the AlphaGo-Fan Hui match was perhaps most reminiscent of the Deep Thought-David Levy match in 1989. Levy was an International Master who had predicted in 1968 that no computer would beat him within ten years. He won that bet, but by 1989 it was clear that computers were better than International Masters and the match between him and Deep Thought was almost a formality. I think that Fan Hui is probably comparable to an International Master; on a world rating list I found online he is #370. By comparison, Lee Sedol is #4. So the question is: can AlphaGo progress from beating an IM-type player to beating a Levon Aronian-type player in five months time?
I don’t think so. But it should be interesting.
I’ve been commissioned to write an article about the upcoming match for Science magazine, which is exciting because it’s the closest I’ve come to combining my “real” career (science writing) with my avocation (chess). If any of you know of people whom I ought to interview — especially people who are “fluent” in both go and chess — I would welcome your suggestions!
