Feature: Historic "Man vs. Machine" showdown revitalizes old board game

Mark Rubenstein was disappointed to see history was made in his favorite game.

At Go, a "uniquely human game that requires intuition," as the American amateur player often proudly introduced it to friends, Google's Deepmind computer system dubbed AlphaGo stunned the world by defeating Lee Sedol, a top professional player, for the third straight time on Saturday.

But for enthusiasts like Rubenstein and much of the world's Go community, the unprecedented level of public and media attention to the historic match between computer and human could also be a boon for the 2,500-year-old Chinese board game, which has limited popularity outside Asia.

"It has generated huge interests in the non-Go playing world," Rubenstein, a computer consultant who runs a Go club in Evanston, Illinois, told Xinhua. "It definitely has brought Go into the mainstream and we are very happy about that."

Over the past days, hundreds of reporters swarmed into a hotel in Seoul, South Korea to cover the five-match series. Online, tens of thousands of people tuned in to watch live broadcast of the contest commentated in English.

"It made headlines around the world," commentator Chris Garlock said in live coverage. "Go has not gotten this kind of attention."

David Ormerod, who is the editor of "Go Game Guru" website, kept providing detailed analysis after each game. He told Xinhua that his website has been seeing about twenty times more visitors than usual over the last few days.

For many years, Ormerod has a casual following of the progress of computer Go. He said seeing the contest take place was almost like "watching someone attempt a moon landing."

Ormerod hopes that the event will have a lasting and positive effect on the community.

"My personal belief is that if more people played Go, we would have a more patient and reasonable society," he said.

Andrew Okun, president of American Go Association, called the match a "powerful" demonstration of the effectiveness of the techniques of artificial intelligence, but he also viewed it as a "win for Go."

"The publicity surrounding this achievement will make it much easier to promote Go and continue the task of making it a world game," Okun told Xinhua.

LEARNING FROM COMPUTER

With trillions of possible moves, Go has been described as one of the "most complex games ever devised by man." The contest of strategy and intuition has bedeviled artificial intelligence (AI) experts for decades.

Okun acknowledged that after the match between AlphaGo and Lee, Go will have lost the mystique of being able to beat computers when other games had succumbed to computerization long ago.

"The most educated go players will feel a loss if much of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of 2,500 years of go playing and teaching are discovered to be incomplete and less powerful than we thought," he said.

That AlphaGo could beat a top professional player came as a surprise as much to the Go community as to researches of artificial intelligence.

"AlphaGo's win means that AI is improving much faster than anyone expected," Chris Nicholson, CEO of Skymind, which specializes in deep learning, told Xinhua.

Offering his explanation on AlphaGo's success at Go, Nicholson said researchers are "discovering strategies that humans haven't used before, and it turns out those actually work."

If AlphaGo continues to improve, said Michael Redmond, the only Westerner with the highest 9-dan professional rank, players will be imitating it in new strategies, which may spark a new revolution of the way people play go.

In this sense, computers could be men's tutors at Go, revealing new things never before understood about the game.

"Go players seem very excited by the prospect of having strong computers to play against and train with," Okun said.

For Ormerod, what he envisioned is an app-like Go program on a smartphone that plays as well as AlphaGo.

"I'm looking forward to the day when I can carry a strong opponent around in my pocket, to play a game whenever it's convenient," he said. Enditem