The start of the Summer Olympics is now less than five months away. And while teams and individuals around the world are competing for a spot at the games in Brazil, a very different kind of competition is about to start this week in Korea. HPR’s Bill Dorman has details in today’s Asia Minute.
It’s human versus machine in the board game of “go”….often called the world’s oldest game still played in its original form. Players use black or white stones to gain territory on a grid by surrounding groups of the other player’s stones.
The game started in China—somewhere between 25,000 and 4,000 years ago. Confucius wrote about it, and we know it’s been played in Japan for more than a thousand years - since it pops up in The Tale of Genji –which was written in the 11th century.
The American Go Association says the game is now more popular in Korea than anywhere else in the world, estimating that five to ten percent of the population plays regularly. So it’s fitting that the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul is the site of a showdown this week between current world champion Lee Se-dol and a computer program called AlphaGo - a self-learning algorithm developed by Google. A similar program from IBM beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov nearly 20 years ago.
But “go” is a tougher challenge for computers—the rules are simple, but the possibilities for arranging those stones complicate the game. The current competition is a 5-day tournament with a million dollar prize for the winner and the games begin tomorrow.
