Weiqi, better known in the west by its Japanese name, Go, is
the oldest game of pure skill in existence and is older by far than all variants
of chess. Though it's been years since chess players could stand a chance
against computer chess programs — World Champion Garry Kasparov lost to IBM's
Deep Blue in 1997 — it's only recently that computer programs have begun
to establish dominance in Go.
After losing a game to Google's AlphaGo in an ongoing match, Ke Jie, regarded as the best Go player humanity has to offer, said of AlphaGo that, “Last year, it was still quite humanlike when it played. But this year, it became like a god of Go.”
AlphaGo learns from itself, playing itself millions of times
at micro-speeds, to improve its game. But Ke Jie learns from AlphaGo, making
moves that give human onlookers pause and that seem to momentarily flummox
AlphaGo.
One oddity of this match is that though Weiqi was born in
China and the match is being held in Wuzhen, on the mainland, Chinese
authorities are making it difficult for Chinese enthusiasts to follow the game in
real time or get news of it.
Why? Because it was an American company, Google, and not a
Chinese company, that programmed AlphaGo, and an insecure and irritable Chinese
leadership resents that fact and exerts itself to suppress it.
Juxtapose that, if you will, with the fact that the cultural
ancestors of this repressive leadership helped develop then foster and esteem
the oldest game of skill known to mankind.
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