China got a wake-up call on AI when a Western machine beat the best Asian players at Go
By Echo Huang, Quartz, July 23, 2017
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China intends to become the world’s artificial intelligence leader in 2030, according to the manifesto it just released describing plans to create an industry of $150 billion and an environment that has AI “everywhere.” According to The New York Times (paywall), these ambitions are propelled in no small part by a machine’s dominance over Asian champions in the ancient strategy game called Go.
Since last year, AlphaGo, developed by the Google-owned artificial-intelligence firm DeepMind, has consistently beaten the world’s top players, from China and South Korea, in a game said to be trickier than chess. The machine’s superiority over humans—a development that as recently as 2014 was not expected to arrive for another decade, marked a major milestone in AI development. At the closely watched recent man-against-machine tournament in China in May, Ke Jie, the world’s best human player at the time, wrote a letter saying “the future belongs to AI” before he sat down to play. Then he lost in back-to-back games to AlphaGo.
