Acaban de crear un robot llamado “Zen” que juega Go tan bien como Deep Blue jugaba ajedrés (es decir, capaz de ganarle a un profesional). Dada la naturaleza del Go, esto es bastante significativo en el mundo de los algoritmos. Va la nota…
(The Daily) – In games ranging from chess to “Jeopardy!” powerful computers are making short work of human champions — with one notable exception.
Fourteen years after Deep Blue stole Garry Kasparov’s crown — and in the wake of Watson’s triumph on the classic game show — some of the world’s top computer scientists are still struggling to best top-level players in the simple board game called Go. The Asian game has caught on in America to the point where hundreds of players have converged on Santa Barbara, Calif., this weekend to compete for the U.S. title.
Invented by the Chinese roughly 4,000 years ago, Go involves two players taking turns placing stones on a board, the objective being to control the most “territory” while capturing your opponent’s stones.
Easy, right? Think again. A $1 million prize offered by a Taiwanese businessman to anyone who could make a professional-level Go-getting computer by the year 2000 went unclaimed, and today top players can still crush the very best Go programs. But a recent victory for a program called “Zen” — which last month beat a highly ranked amateur player from Taiwan — has the Go programmer community buzzing.
“Can this be a turning point in the history of Go?” asked Zen co-creator Hideki Kato in a Go forum after the victorious results.
Spirits are high among Go programmers, who have struggled since the early 1980s to build bots that can hold their own.
“Progress has been extremely spectacular in the recent past,” said Rémi Coulom, the author of the other top Go software, Crazy Stone.
So why is this simple-seeming board game still considered the high bar for artificial intelligence?
In a word, complexity. Though Go is a straightforward game, it’s not won by brute-force calculation, as with chess.
Because Go has 361 points where stones can be placed, the number of possible configurations is unfathomably huge. One commonly cited statistic has it that the number of possible games in Go is a number with 360 zeros (that is, 10^360).
By comparison, the number of atoms in the known universe has only 80 zeros (10^80)…
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Go-bot
i_alcocer ████████ 