2016.0310
CSIE Doctor Helps Google Beat Go Champ
Google defeat Go Champion with the help of a Taiwanese programmer.
AlphaGO, a computer program developed by Google DeepMind in London, beat South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol on the 9th of March. The result was shocking to the world. And there was a Taiwanese born and educated doctor behind the super program AlphaGO.
“It was spectacular, so unbelievable ” Professor Shun-Shii Lin of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering exclaimed in the classroom after watching the game with his students. That was a first match between the artificial intelligence system AlphaGo and the South Korean professional Go player of 9-dan rank.
Google’s AlphaGo beat the European Go champion Fan Hui in October, 2015 and this was its second try against human player. What’s most incredible is that AlphaGo was only 2-dan rank 6 months ago and now it beat the professional Go player, who is a 9-dan rank.
The man who placed the counters on behalf of AlphaG is Aja Huang, one of the key developers behind AlphaGo. Huang was graduated as a doctor from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering. Professor Lin was his advisor and was really happy that Huang keep working on his interest, which h
Huang obtained his degree in 2011 and he went to the University of Alberta for a year. Later, he worked for the English company DeepMind. In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind by more than $500 million.
Huang obtained sixth-dan ranking as an amateur go player in 2007. He was enthusiastic about Go and collected as many Kifu as possible and upload these data into programs he wrote. In his last year as a doctoral student, his software Erica, defeated the then-champion program “Zen” and won a gold at the Computer Olympiad.