Search Search Google AlphaGo computer beats professional at 'world's most complex board game' Go More complex than chess: the Chinese board game Go / Wikimedia/Creative Commons Milestone in AI research likened to defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 by IBM’s Deep Blue computer 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech It was considered one of the last great challenges between man and machine but now, for the first time, a computer program has beaten a professional player of the ancient Chinese game of Go in a defeat that many had not expected for at least another 10 years.
 The machine’s victory is being likened to the defeat of reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 by IBM’s Deep Blue computer, which became a milestone in the advance of artificial intelligence over the human mind.
 Go, however, is more complex than chess with an infinitely greater number of potential moves, so experts were surprised to find that computer scientists had invented a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that taught the computer how to win against Europe’s top player.
 Read more 'Artificial intelligence alarmists' win 'Luddite of the Year' award The program, called AlphaGo, defeated European champion Fan Hui by a resounding five games to nil in a match played last October but only now revealed in a scientific study of the moves and algorithms published last night in the journal Nature.
 A match against the current world Go champion, Lee Sedol from South Korea, is now scheduled for March.
 It was the first time a computer had won against a professional Go player on a full-sized board without any handicaps or advantages given to either side, said Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, the AI arm of Google in London, who helped to write the program.
 Go rules The rules of Go are deceptively simple and no luck is involved.
 Two players – one black, one white – start with an empty board by placing one of their pieces or “stones” on a position, from where it does not move.
 The winner is the first to fill more than half the board with their stones.
 It is possible to take an opponent’s stone by completely surrounding it with your stones.
 Children and adults can easily play against each other and a handicap system allows players of different strengths to play with a 50 per cent chance of winning.
 “Go is the probably the most complex board game humans play.
 There are more configurations of the board than there are atoms in the Universe.
 In the end, AlphaGo won 5-nil and it was perhaps stronger than even we were expecting,” Mr Hassabis said.
 “AlphaGo discovered for itself many of the patterns and moves needed to play Go.
 Go is considered to be the pinnacle of AI research – the holy grail.
 For us, it was an irresistible challenge,” he said.
 Computer chess programs work by analysing every possible move on the board but this is relatively straightforward when there are about 20 possible moves for each stage of the game.
 In Go, however, there are about 200 possible moves, making the task of writing a winning program far more difficult.
 Science news in pictures Science news in pictures The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years.
 The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth.
 Pictures by: Tom Momary Included in Wellcome Image Awards, this 3D image of an African grey parrot shows the highly intricate system of blood vessels.
 Scott Birch.
 Wellcome Images Another Wellcome Images Award winner, this time of baby Hawaiian bobtail squid.
 The black ink sac and light organ in the centre of the squid’s mantle cavity can be clearly seen.
 Macroscopic Solutions.
 Wellcome Images archaeologists The people are thought to have been unusually tall and strong.
 The tallest of the skeletons uncovered measured at 1.
9m YouTube Sunspots are caused by interactions with the Sun’s magnetic field and are cooler areas on the star’s surface.
 Nasa Workflow Clear Cache NewsScience 132 million-year-old dinosaur fossil found at factory in Surrey Paleontologists Sarah Moore and Jamie Jordan believe they have discovered a Iguanodon dinosaur, a herbivore that was around three metres tall and 10 metres long Cambridge Photographers/Wienerberger toxic chemicals on its surface The Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on Mars Getty Images and third largest in the world, is seen in Yellowstone National Park.
 The park is famous for its geothermal activity – which includes its spectacular, flowing springs as well as the famous "Old Faithful" geyser that sprays water out every hour or so.
 REUTERS/Jim Urquhart This images is apart of the Wellcome Images Awards and shows how an artificial intraocular lens is fitted onto the eye.
 Used for conditions such as myopia and cataracts.
 Cambridge University Hospitals NHS FT.
 Wellcome Images from the 'doomsday bank' Researchers in the Middle East have asked for seeds including those of wheat, barley and grasses, all of which are chosen because especially resistant to dry conditions.
 It is the first withdrawal from the bank, which was built in 2008.
 Those researchers would normally request the seeds from a bank in Aleppo.
 But that centre has been damaged by the war — while some of its functions continue, and its cold storage still works, it has been unable to provide the seeds that are needed by the rest of the Middle East, as it once did.
 New research has become the first to isolate the particular scent of human death, describing the various chemicals that are emitted by corpses in an attempt to help find them in the future.
 The researchers hope that the findings are the first step towards working on a synthetic smell that could train cadaver dogs to be able to more accurately find human bodies, or to eventually developing electronic devices that can look for the scent themselves.
 Astronomers have captured a black hole eating a star and then sicking a bit of it back up for the first time ever.
 The scientists tracked a star about as big as our sun as it was pulled from its normal path and into that of a supermassive black hole before being eaten up.
 They then saw a high-speed flare get thrust out, escaping from the rim of the black hole.
 Scientists have seen black holes killing and swallowing stars.
 And the jets have been seen before.
But a new study shows the first time that they have captured the hot flare that comes out just afterwards.
 And the flare and then swallowed star have not been linked together before evolutionary divide in North America A British scientist has uncovered the fossil of a dog-sized horned dinosaur that roamed eastern North America up to 100 million years ago.
 The fragment of jaw bone provides evidence of an east-west divide in the evolution of dinosaurs on the North American continent.
 During the Late Cretaceous period, 66 to 100 million years ago, the land mass was split into two continents by a shallow sea.
 This sea, the Western Interior Seaway, ran from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.
 Dinosaurs living in the western continent, called Laramidia, were similar to those found in Asia Brains cannot be categorised into female and male, according to the first study to look at sex differences in the whole brain.
 Specific parts of the brain do show sex differences, but individual brains rarely have all “male” traits or all “female” traits.
 Some characteristics are more common in women, while some are more common in men, and some are common in both men and women, according to the study than previously thought Life may have come to earth 4.
1 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years earlier than we knew.
 The discovery, made using graphite that was trapped in ancient crystals, could mean that life began "almost instantaneously" after the Earth was formed.
 The researchers behind it have described the discovery as “a potentially transformational scientific advance”.
 Previously, life on Earth was understood to have begun when the inner solar system was hit by a massive bombardment from space, which also formed the moon's craters Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars.
 Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae — or dark patches — on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts.
 Earth could be in danger as our galaxy throws out comets that could hurtle towards us and wipe us out, scientists have warned.
 Scientists have previously presumed that we are in a relatively safe period for meteor impacts, which are linked with the journey of our sun and its planets, including Earth, through the Milky Way.
 But some orbits might be more upset than we know, and there is evidence of recent activity, which could mean that we are passing through another meteor shower.
 Showers of meteors periodically pass through the area where the Earth is, as gravitational disturbances upset the Oort Cloud, which is a shell of icy objects on the edge of the solar system.
 They happen on a 26-million year cycle, scientists have said, which coincide with mass extinctions over the last 260-million years Chinese scientists have created genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs, after editing the genes of the animals for the first time.
 The scientists create beagles that have double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a certain gene, reports the MIT Technology Review.
 The mutant dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications”, Liangxue Lai, one of the researchers on the project.
 Now the team hope to go on to create other modified dogs, including those that are engineered to have human diseases like muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s.
 Since dogs’ anatomy is similar to those of humans’, intentionally creating dogs with certain human genetic traits could allow scientists to further understand how they occur Scientists say that the new dinosaur, known as Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, “challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology”.
 Florida State University professor of biological science Greg Erickson said: “It creates this natural question.
 How did they survive up here?
” model of the Solar System in a Nevada desert Illustrations of the Earth and moon show the two to be quite close together, Mr Overstreet said.
 This is inaccurate, the reason being that these images are not to scale.
 “The search process itself is not based on brute force but on something complex intuitive machinery that we only previously thought to be possible in the human brain,” said David Silver of Google DeepMind, the lead author of the study.
 AlphaGo uses two neural networks working in parallel and interacting with one another.
 A “value network” evaluated the positions of the black and white pieces or “stones” on the board, while a “policy network” selected the moves based on continuous learning of both past human moves and the program’s own dummy moves, Mr Silver said.
 Video: IBM’s Watson defeats greatest 'Jeopardy!
' champions “Humans can play perhaps a thousand games in a year whereas AlphaGo can play millions of games a day.
 It is conceivable with enough process power, training and search power that AlphaGo could reach a level that is beyond any human,” he said.
 Milestones in AI Research speculating on the possibility of creating machines that can think – as defined by his Turing Test.
 intelligence” was born with the Dartmouth Conference of researchers including Marvin Minsky talking about creating an artificial brain.
 companies as the first commercial exploitation of AI.
 system that could play chess as well as a grand master.
 Garry Kasparov for the first time.
 driving autonomously for 131 miles along a rehearsed desert track.
 greatest champions in the American quiz show Jeopardy!
, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.
 Watson won $1m first prize.
 In tests against other Go computer games on the market, AlphaGo won all but one out of 500 games, even when other programs were given a head-start with pieces already positioned on the board.
 Mr Silver said the neural networks were able to learn by themselves, unlike the “supervised” training of other artificial intelligence algorithms.
 “It learns in a human-like manner but it still takes a lot of practice.
 It has to play many millions of games to do what a human player can learn in a few games,” Mr Silver said.
 World champion Lee Sedol said he is looking forward to the challenge match in March.
 “I have heard that Google DeepMind's AI is surprisingly strong and getting stronger, but I am confident that I can win at least this time,” he said.
 Jon Diamond, president of the British Go Association, said: “Before this match the best computer programs were not as good as the top amateur players and I was still expecting that it would be at least 5 or 10 years before a program would be able to beat the top human players; now it looks like this may be imminent.
 The proposed challenge may well be that day.
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