Game over? Historic milestone as computer trounces human champ at weiqi for the first time

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The game of weiqi, or go, has existed for 3,000 years and is regarded by many as the ultimate test of strategy. Photo: SCMP Picture

Published: 8:00am, 28 Jan 2016Updated: 8:12am, 28 Jan 2016

In a milestone for artificial intelligence, a computer has beaten a human champion at weiqi, the ancient Chinese strategy game also known as “go”, that requires intuition rather than brute processing power to prevail, its makers said.

Dubbed AlphaGo, the system honed its own skills through a process of trial and error, playing millions of games against itself until it was battle-ready, and surprised even its creators with its prowess. The feat was reported in the scientific journal Nature.

“AlphaGo won five-nil, and it was stronger than perhaps we were expecting,” Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence (AI) company, said Wednesday.

A computer defeating a professional human player at the 3,000-year-old Chinese board game, was thought to be about a decade off.

As if weiqi wasn’t hard enough, these young players now face the prospect of computers that can beat the world’s best. Photo: SCMP Picture

The clean-sweep victory over three-time European Go champion Fan Hui “signifies a major step forward in one of the great challenges in the development of artificial intelligence - that of game-playing,” the British Go Association said in a statement.

The two-player game is described as perhaps the most complex ever designed, with more configurations possible than there are atoms in the Universe, Hassabis says.