Go: How AI challenges the future of an ancient game

JAMIE TANG STAFF WRITER

Invented over 3000 years ago, the two-player mind game Go (also known as weiqi or baduk) is rooted in the Chinese theory of yin and yang that urges people to seek harmony in their lives. Go seems simpler than chess. The game has one type of playing piece, a stone, with one player playing black and the other white. The objective is simple: surround more territory than your opponent. The 19-by-19 Go board, compared to an 8-by8 chess board, results in more than 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations. That’s more than the number of subatomic particles in the known universe! Due to the game’s possibilities, computer programs have struggled to develop efficient algorithms that could defeat amateur and professional Go players.

Until March 2016. The Google DeepMind team aspired to devise a computer program with the intelligence and intuition to defeat human Go players. The DeepMind team combined advanced search trees with deep neural networks to develop an advanced computer program. The program played with amateur human players to understand the human mind. The result was Alpha Go, a computer program capable of calculating 10,000 moves per second. Nineteen years after IBM’s computer program DeepBlue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, Alpha Go sealed a 4-1 victory against the 18-time world champion Lee Sedol. Played between March 9-15, 2016, the fivegame series attracted over 200 million viewers online.

Three years later, Lee Sedol announced his retirement from professional play, stating that AlphaGo was “an entity that cannot be defeated.” Since then, AlphaGo and subsequent versions have changed the game. Surprisingly, artificial intelligence is better at evaluating global positions than conducting in-depth local calculations. The more efficient variations that AlphaGo innovated, like the direct 3-3 invasion, have replaced classical ones. Although some applaud artificial intelligence for introducing new variations and improving the accuracy of human play, others find that reliance on artificial intelligence has robbed the game’s beauty. intelligence cheating during the Covid-19 pandemic led many Go organizations to enforce new guidelines, such as prohibiting electronics and requiring proctors. In the US Open Masters, the most high-stakes North American tournament, Han Han accused 14-year-old Alex Qi of using his glasses to cheat during their match. While the accusation was disproven, the example shows increasing distrust with the advancements in artificial intelligence.

Nonetheless, like Chat GPT, computer programs serve as a tool for Go players to improve their skills. Software engineer Eric Lui, one of the top American professional Go players, attested to the benefits of artificial intelligence.

“AI is something I