The story of AlphaGo so far

The story of AlphaGo so far

AlphaGo is the first computer program to defeat a professional human Go player, the first program to defeat a Go world champion, and arguably the strongest Go player in history.rjX快充网络

AlphaGo’s first formal match was against the reigning 3-times European Champion, Mr Fan Hui, in October 2015. Its 5-0 win was the first ever against a Go professional, and the results were published in full technical detail in the international journal, Nature. AlphaGo then went on to compete against legendary player Mr Lee Sedol, winner of 18 world titles and widely considered to be the greatest player of the past decade.rjX快充网络

AlphaGo's 4-1 victory in Seoul, South Korea, in March 2016 was watched by over 200 million people worldwide. It was a landmark achievement that experts agreed was a decade ahead of its time, and earned AlphaGo a 9 dan professional ranking (the highest certification) - the first time a computer Go player had ever received the accolade.uring the games, AlphaGo played a handful of highly inventive winning moves, several of which - including move 37 in game two - were so surprising they overturned hundreds of years of received wisdom, and have since been examined extensively by players of all levels. In the course of winning, AlphaGo somehow taught the world completely new knowledge about perhaps the most studied and contemplated game in history.rjX快充网络

Since then, AlphaGo has continued to surprise and amaze. In January 2017, an improved AlphaGo version was revealed as the online player "Master" which achieved 60 straight wins in online fast time-control games against top international Go players.rjX快充网络

In May 2017, Alpha Go took part in The Future of Go Summit in the birthplace of Go, China, to delve deeper into the mysteries of Go in a spirit of mutual collaboration with the country’s top players. You can read more about the five day summit here.rjX快充网络

Mastering the game of Go  

The complexity of Go means it has long been viewed as the most challenging of classical games for artificial intelligence. Despite decades of work, the strongest computer Go programs were only able to play at the level of human amateurs.rjX快充网络

Traditional AI methods, which construct a search tree over all possible positions, don’t have a chance in Go. This is because of the sheer number of possible moves and the difficulty of evaluating the strength of each possible board position.rjX快充网络

In order to capture the intuitive aspect of the game, we knew that we would need to take a novel approach. AlphaGo therefore combines an advanced tree search with deep neural networks. These neural networks take a description of the Go board as an input and process it through a number of different network layers containing millions of neuron-like connections. One neural network, the “policy network”, selects the next move to play. The other neural network, the “value network”, predicts the winner of the game.rjX快充网络

We showed AlphaGo a large number of strong amateur games to help it develop its own understanding of what reasonable human play looks like. Then we had it play against different versions of itself thousands of times, each time learning from its mistakes and incrementally improving until it became immensely strong, through a process known as reinforcement learning.rjX快充网络

Our Nature paper, published on 28th January 2016, describes the technical details behind this original approach in greater detail.rjX快充网络

Read more about how AlphaGo uses machine learning to master the game of Go in our blog post.rjX快充网络