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Can a Computer Beat any Human in any Game?

Slashdot Games reports on an important landmark in the history of the board game go: for the first time, a computer beat a human go player. Obviously, it was not just any player but a championship level player, and it wasn't just a computer but a 800 processors, at 4.7 Ghz one.

The shocking triumph of the MoGo computer program on Myungwan Kim 8P took the entire American Go Association (AGA) by surprise. Or in Bob Hearns words: "Go is often seen as the last bastion of human superiority over computers in the domain of board games... today's result suggests that the days of human superiority may be numbered."

The Board Game Go

Go origins go back about four thousands years, together with backgammon, these are the most ancient board games in history of mankind. Starting out in China, spread out to Japan and Korea and eventually came to conquered Europe and America, the board game go is still played by millions of people mainly in the United States and East Asia.

Similar to backgammon, go has a fairly easy set of rules, but the multiple possibilities available in every turn and the complicated strategy making it one of the most challenging games to master. To cut short, go is a two players game played on a 19X19 grid (i.e. 361 intersections) with black and white stones. The object of the game is to take over the territory by placing the stones on the intersections of the grid alternately.

Go, Backgammon and Computers

And back to backgammon. The MoGo victory story on Slashdot raised quite an interesting debate in the comments; since many of them are designated to programming specialists, I'll allow myself to skip over the irrelevant wisecracks highlight the most insightful remarks for the backgammon and board games enthusiast.

Jjohnson, for example, describes the history of chess computers as "the history of building brute force engines and then refining them by identifying where processing power is successful at winning." fractic marks that unlike in go, "chess positions only get simpler as the game progresses because pieces are removed", implying that this historic moment was delayed due to the complexity of go rules. Fished summarized the discussion beautifully saying that building a computer that can eliminate the best possible moves in go positions, again as opposed to board games such as backgammon, chess and checkers with their limited number of possibilities is "like trying to teach a computer how to evaluate a painting." I wonder what he had to say about a Jeopardy playing computer...

About Slashdot

Slashdot is a pioneer science and technology internet magazine that focuses on "news for nerds (and) stuff that matters" including games, gadgets, hardware, etc. Launched in 1997, Slashdot was recently purchased by the media and e-commerce company SourceForge Inc, yet it still edited by some of its founding members and still visited by its original followers.