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Why Computers Can’t Play Go

Computers have now forever been able to play nearly every hame we’ve invented. Most, they can even master better than us.

One game has always been different in that matter, as it keeps unbeaten: The ancient Chinese game of Go.

The Times of London has an interesting article on why the computer still can’t beat an average human Go player.

The computer can play chess because it can calculate the results of all possible moves and then pick the best one.  In chess, there are usually 25-35 possible moves at any point.  In Go, there are 250.  This makes the brute force strategy a lot harder.  Almost impossibly hard.  The thinking goes that playing Go well is all about recognizing patterns – something computers are notoriously bad at.  If so, being able to play Go well would be a breakthrough affecting lots of other areas of computing from vision to AI.

Go is seen as a key to unlocking the secret of artificial intelligence (AI). If computers can “learn” the game, some scientists believe, mankind would be a huge step closer to replicating human thought processes, with great scientific benefits. Conversely, so long as we can still beat computers at this most human game, then the spectre of a machine that can comprehend rather than merely compute will remain the stuff of fiction.