Page 27 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

perhaps unsure how the next few moves may turn out. With a computer, there is no body language, but in chess playing programs of years gone by, a longer processing time could mean the computer was having to recalculate a strategy. The IBM team recognised that such timings could psychologically affect Kasparov and opted to programme Deep Blue to sometimes take longer than it strictly needed, to give the idea that a move may be more complex than it seemed at first glance.
All these factors combined to eventually break Kasparov down psychologically. Even he admits that certain moves – a number of which were later revealed as mistakes by Deep Blue – played heavily on his mind, as to whether they were brilliant or idiotic, visionary or a glitch. And all such uncertainty was further compounded when IBM refused to release the log files of Deep Blue’s
activities, creating even more doubt around the already rather devious tactics employed by the multinational corporation.
Whilst the victory was a milestone for computing power, Deep Blue would not strictly be seen as a “learning machine” by today’s artificial intelligence standards. Where modern AI can learn and adjust, Deep Blue simply exhausted every possibility in its tree search schema, running through hundreds of thousands of moves per second to find the best, pre-programmed outcome. What Deep Blue did prove, however, was that brute force and cold hard steel can outlast, and eventually outplay, even the most gifted human counterpart. The computer was ultimately not smarter or more strategic than Kasparov, but it was more resilient, more composed, and less emotional – simply less human.
1.5 ALPHAGO VS LEE SEDOL
Lee Sedol has an air of genius about him, although not an air of command or confidence. His thick, dark hair is cut in a bowl-like style and his voice is rather high pitched with an almost childish tone. Born on the South Korean island of Bigeumdo, when Sedol arrived in the capital of Seoul at the age of eight to attend the Korean International Baduk Academy (KIBA), he was given the nickname “Bigeumdo Boy” by his classmates because of his rural upbringing and his subsequent naive and deeply curious nature in relation to his new environment. The KIBA school – dedicated to training up professional Go
players from an early age – was founded by Kweon Kab- yong, a legendary Go teacher in Korea who has produced many of the greatest players of modern times. As a pupil of the academy, Sedol attended classes from 9am to 9pm, seven days a week, and eventually ended up living with Master Kweon as one of the most promising students he had ever come to recognise.
Dating back to the 4th century BC, as recorded in the ancient historical commentaries contained in the Zuo zhuan manuscripts, Go – or weiqi, as it is known in China – is considered one of the oldest board games in existence, having been played consistently for at least 2 500 years. Known by the name baduk in Korea, Go reached the nation’s borders by the 5th century CE and has held a special place in the culture of the Korean people for over a millennium. So deeply is the game entrenched in Korean culture that it is traditionally considered one of the core pursuits for higher literacy along with similarly noble disciplines such as music, poetry and painting.
And because of this special place in Korean culture, those who
excel at Go are generally regarded as some of the most
intelligent individuals amongst their peers.
ALPHAGO VS LEE SEDOL
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