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On Reflection | Why 2017 will be Asia’s year for artificial intelligence

The defeat of a Go grandmaster at the hands of a Google computer shows AI is here to stay. And Asia can take the lead as we wave goodbye to human fallibility

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Lee Sedol, one of the greatest modern players of the ancient board game Go, takes on Google’s AlphaGo. He lost the series 4-1 in an event that shows beyond doubt, AI is here to stay. Photo: AFP

Facebook. Google. Apple. Baidu. Not a day goes by when we don’t hear of something related to artificial intelligence in the news. But AI (sometimes confused with machine learning, which is simply a technique within AI) wouldn’t be where it is today if it weren’t for one seminal event in 2016: AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol.

It’s the tech equivalent of Leicester City winning the Premier League, or the Golden State Warriors winning 73 games in the NBA. It’s the unimaginable happening, right in front of our own eyes.

Lee Sedol, one of the greatest modern players of the ancient board game Go, looks a little glum after being trounced by AlphaGo. Photo: AFP
Lee Sedol, one of the greatest modern players of the ancient board game Go, looks a little glum after being trounced by AlphaGo. Photo: AFP

In March last year, an AI program that trained itself to play the ancient game of Go beat the 18-time world champion. The reason it was such a feat for AI, was because Go is about feel, strategic judgment and winning multiple battles across the board – and a computer cannot simply memorise all possible combinations of board pieces, assess the situation, construct and execute a strategy to win, like chess.

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So the programmers of AlphaGo, from Google DeepMind, set up the basic heuristics of the game, allowed AlphaGo to analyse previous games and then split its brain so it could play itself millions of times.

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