【明報專訊】Google's DeepMind revealed its AlphaGo artificial intelligence (人工智能) system in 2015 — the first computer program that defeated a world champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go (圍棋). Scientists have unveiled the latest version of the system called AlphaGo Zero, which learns to play simply by playing games against itself. The system surpasses the abilities of the old version that beat world champion Lee Sedol in 4 out of 5 games in 2016, after just three days of self-play.

Previous versions of AlphaGo were initially trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games to learn how to play Go. AlphaGo Zero skips this step and learns from scratch by playing against itself. In trials, after 40 days of self-training, AlphaGo Zero was able to outperform the previous version of AlphaGo, which has defeated the world's best players and world number one Ke Jie (柯潔) .

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's chief executive, said the system could now have more general applications in scientific research, "We're quite excited because we think this is now good enough to make some real progress on some real problems even though we're obviously a long way from full AI."

(Source: Ming Pao, The Guardian , Daily Mail)

■Photo Story

In May 2017, the previous version of AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie for the third time.

■English highway﹕from scratch

If you start something from scratch, you start from the very beginning without using any of the work done earlier.

e.g. He had no money and no rich friends, so he had to build his business from scratch.

■Quiz

Answer the following questions.

(Answers on next text)

1. Find in paragraph one a word that is opposite in meaning to "recent". ___________

2. Is the following sentence true or false?

AlphaGo Zero defeated Ke Jie three times.

True/False

3. How does AlphaGo Zero learn to play Go?

_____________________________________

4. Which of the following is an appropriate title for the above article?

a. Battle with world number one Go player

b. Breakthrough in Al: Learning Go from scratch

c. Why did Ke Jie lose to AlphaGo?

d. What is artificial intelligence ?

■Glossary

unveil (v) 推出; 公佈

surpass (v) 勝過

initially (adv) 起初

amateur (n) 業餘愛好者

[Smarties' Power English 第196期]