Humans No Match for Go Bot Overlords | Wired Science from Wired.com

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Humans No Match for Go Bot Overlords

For the last two decades, human cognitive superiority had a distinctive sound: the soft click of stones placed on a wooden Go board. But once again, artificial intelligence is asserting its domination over gray matter.

Just a few years ago, the best Go programs were routinely beaten by skilled children, even when given a head start. Artificial intelligence researchers routinely said that computers capable of beating our best were literally unthinkable. And so it was. Until now.

"It's a silly human conceit that such a domain would exist, that there's something only we can figure out with our wetware brains," said David Doshay , a University of California at Santa Cruz computer scientist. "Because at the same time, another set of humans is just as busily saying, 'Yes, but we can knock this problem into another domain, and solve it using these machines.'"

In February, at the Taiwan Open — Go 's popularity in East Asia roughly compares to America's enthusiasm for golf — a program called MoGo beat two professionals . At an exhibition in Chicago, the Many Faces program beat another pro . The programs still had a head start, but the trend is clear.

Arrayed by opposing players trying to capture space on its lined 19x19 grid, the black and white Go stones can end a game in 10 possible ways — about 10 times more configurations than there are elementary particles in the known universe .

Faced with such extraordinary complexity, our brains somehow find a path, navigating the possibilities using mechanisms only dimly understood by science. Both of the programs that have recently defeated humans used variations on mathematical techniques originally developed by Manhattan Project physicists to coax order from pure randomness.

Called the Monte Carlo method , it has driven computer ...

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