Artificial intelligence in the game of go

Early in the film "A Beautiful Mind," the mathematician John Nash is seen sitting in a Princeton courtyard, hunched over a playing board covered with small black and white pieces that look like pebbles. He was playing Go, an ancient Asian game. Frustration at losing that game inspired the real Nash to pursue the mathematics of game theory, research for which he eventually was awarded a Nobel Prize.
在电影《美丽心灵》里有这样一幕场景：教学家约翰·纳什坐在普林斯顿大学的庭院里，俯身注视一种游戏，在一块木板上点缀着黑色和白色的像鹅卵石那样的东西。纳什正在下围棋，围棋是一个源自亚洲的古老游戏。虽然输掉游戏让他沮丧不已，但是却促使他专注于博弈的数学研究，他也最终由此获得诺贝尔奖。

In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination and frustration. Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even chess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at that time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player.
近几年来，计算机科学家们，特别是专攻人工智能这块的科学家们也同样感受到纳什的这种痴迷和沮丧。其它棋类游戏的电脑程序都比较简单编写，国际象棋也在功能强劲的处理器面前乖乖屈服。五年前，一部叫“深蓝”的电脑不仅击垮了当时的世界冠军卡斯帕罗夫，而且还重挫了他的锐气。这是因为国际象棋虽然错综复杂，但仍可简化成强力运算。围棋却不大一样，看上去好像很容易学会——无论人还是电脑，但事实上要达到精通的水平却要付出多年的摸索。到目前为止，仍没有电脑能够超出业余围棋手的水平。

The game is played on a board divided into a grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. Black and white pieces called stones are placed one at a time on the grid's intersections. The object is to acquire and defend territory by surrounding it with stones. Programmers working on Go see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting the ways the human mind works. The challenge of programming a computer to mimic that process goes to the core of artificial intelligence, which involves the study of learning and decision-making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition and perhaps most intriguingly, intuition.
围棋游戏是在一块由19条水平线和19条垂直线围成格子的木板上进行的。黑色或白色的棋子每次只能下一颗于格子交叉处。目的是通过围格子获得或保卫“领土”。编程人员认为围棋比象棋更能精确地反映人类思维的方式。要让电脑模仿人那样思考牵涉到人工智能的核心技术，例如要教会电脑如何学习、下结论、战略考虑、知识再现、模式识别，以及也许是最引人注目的技术——直觉认知。

Danny Hillis, a computer designer and chairman of the technology company Applied Minds, said the depth of Go made it ripe for the kind of scientific progress that came from studying one example in great detail.
电脑工程师兼Applied Minds科技公司的主席丹尼·席立斯表示：科学的进步源于对典型事物的全面研究，而对深奥围棋的研究正是促进科学进步的好时机。

"We want the equivalent of a fruit fly to study,"

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