Game of Go or pin the Universe?

Gaberlunzie, a longterm admirer of the New York Times technology boffin, John Markoff (below right) is intrigued to read his comments on the 'Game of Go' and having browsed Pinterest latest gallery thinks calling it Spectacular Universe puts it mildly. Awesome is the word that springs to mind as it puts perspective to man, machine and games.

“The Google program combines two types of algorithms" says Markoff. "One is a machine learning algorithm, which does an extremely good job of recognising patterns based on being trained on a vast set of examples. So it is likely to have seen almost any move that a human could make, and also know which responses are better ones.

“A second type of algorithm can also see the consequences of particular moves far, far in advance of the game by playing millions and millions or perhaps even billions of combinations of moves. In contrast, human Go experts have their experience to rely on, but it is fuzzy by comparison. Think of this as an intellectual version of John Henry and the jackhammer.
And remember, right now the only thing the program can do is play Go.”

The Spectacular Universe is putting Pinterest.com’s  latest gallery mildly!!  It’s just simply awesome. 

Footnote: The Drum  notes that Lee Se-do (below left) makes his first Go win against Google's DeepMind AI which  has now  lost a match of Go against the 33-year-old South Korean Lee Se-dol, after defeating him three times in a row.

AlphaGo, the AI from Google’s DeepMind  made history by  defeating Se-dol for the third time on Saturday, sparking a major milestone in AI software by showing its ability to adapt to situations emerging during bouts of the game against one of its finest players.

But like all machines DeepMind also has its limitations it appears.