Humans No Match for Go Bot Overlords

For the last two decades, human cognitive superiority had a distinctive sound: the soft click of stones placed on a wooden Go board. But once again, artificial intelligence is asserting its domination over gray matter.

Just a few years ago, the best Go programs were routinely beaten by skilled children, even when given a head start. Artificial intelligence researchers routinely said that computers capable of beating our best were literally unthinkable. And so it was. Until now.

“It’s a silly human conceit that such a domain would exist, that there’s something only we can figure out with our wetware brains,” said David Doshay, a University of California at Santa Cruz computer scientist. “Because at the same time, another set of humans is just as busily saying, ‘Yes, but we can knock this problem into another domain, and solve it using these machines.’”

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