One day in August 2015, when Fan, who had just enjoyed red wine for lunch, returned to his home in France, he opened his computer as usual to check the email and suddenly found an email from London. The email was to the effect that a tech company called Deepmind invited him to his London headquarters to work on a Go research project.
Fan Li's first feeling of growing up in China is, this can't be a scam email, right? He replied with a casual attitude. Deepmind's more detailed and frequent responses then convinced him that it was a real company and that they really wanted to work with him on Go.
A month later, Fan got on a plane to London, where he met Dr. Huang, who was mailing the email, at the company's headquarters. After a brief introduction to the company and the project, Dr. Huang directly explained his wishes: they wanted Fan and the Alpha Go software being developed to test the next five-game game.
Fan Li thought to himself, I have never heard of Go AI before, and I am not playing against the computer for minutes? How can a computer study Go understand! Fan's strength lies in his superb Go level. After entering the stage in his early years, he trained with the national junior team and Guli and others, and then went to France alone and settled down, playing Go without interruption, and won three consecutive European Go championships in 13-15 years, and was invincible in Europe.
At the beginning of the first game, Fan Li wanted to solve the opponent with three or two strokes, but he did not expect that the emotionless machine opposite seemed to be a combination of many Go masters, not only meticulous in chess thinking, but also flawless. Not only did fan qi suffer in the layout stage, but the second half of the plate was also watertight, and finally lost the game.
Fan Li was serious, and he kept thinking about the content of the first game of chess in his mind, trying to find the weakness of AI, but he failed. In the second game, Fan Li used strong in many places, and the bottom was very supportive, but the AI could always find his loopholes lightly, and let him lose money unhurriedly. For many of his testers, the AI even chose to take off directly! The losses everywhere made Fan Li upset and the pressure continued to increase, and finally it was full of jade chips.
In the third, fourth, and fifth innings, Fan Li lost "unsurprisingly". At the end of the fifth set, Fan Li held his head in silence for a minute, and then said to Dr. Huang, who was smiling opposite, "I want to go out and be quiet." ”
Fan Li thought a lot at that time. When he had just promised to fight, he didn't have any ideas, and he felt that he could easily defeat the enemy. However, now that five games have been exhausted, he is worried that the celebrities and chess fans in the Go industry will not let him go, they will question his chess ability, and even denigrate his credibility, after all, the peak of human wisdom that human beings are proud of is easily broken by machines.
But on second thought, it's not your own problem either. Fan Li quickly understood that the new era of Go had begun, and human beings needed to re-understand And learn Go.
Dr. Huang had previously made an invitation to him: "After the game, we want to continue to improve the level of Alpha Go, would you like to join our team?" After a few minutes of thinking, Fan Li resolutely turned around and walked into Deepmind. He has two more identities: Alphago project consultant and deepmind external ambassador.
In fact, Fan Li's battle was not particularly famous at that time, but when the legendary chess player Lee Sedol confirmed that he wanted to play five chess with alpha dogs, Fan Li's battle record was known to many people. So Fan Li really began to be "verbally criticized", all kinds of professional chess players criticized Fan Qi's chess, and The chess saint Nie Weiping said that Fan Li was "humiliated" and did not believe that AI could defeat the top human chess players. But to say who criticizes the most ruthlessly, it is Ke Jie Jiudan, who has just won the world championship in a row at that time, and vaguely became the first person trend.
Ke Jie was playing the third game of Fan Li and Alpha Dog in a live broadcast of Lee Sedol's human-machine war preview, and Chen Ying, the royal commentator of Tianyuan Go, was also there. Ke Jie criticized Fan Qi fiercely in the live broadcast:
"Chess Stinks"
"Many professional chess players feel that Fan Is humiliated"
"I don't know much about Going"
"This chess hand doesn't even have an amateur 1 dan"...
Ke Jie also bluntly said that he was "criticizing Fan Qi", and several other people had been laughing at the time.
(Note: The v13 version is played against Fan Li, and the Alpha Dog has evolved to the v18 version when playing with Lee Sedol, but no matter how much criticism Fan Li receives, it should not be)
After enduring a lot of accusations and insults, Fan Li did not say anything, and he silently waited for the day when Alpha Go shocked the world. Before playing five games with Lee Sedol, almost everyone in the chess industry thought that Lee Sedol would win easily, and 5:0 was the most predicted score. In China, only one chess player has sung the opposite, and Li Zhe, a graduate student in philosophy at Peking University, believes that alpha will win, saying that human beings will eventually be defeated by their emotions.
Sure enough, the final score of that man-machine war was 1:4, Lee Sedol was defeated by a big score, and Fan Li sat in the center of the referee's seat to witness everything. A basin of cold water was poured from head to toe in the Go world, and everyone had to accept the fact that AI had conquered Go. A year later, Ke Jie challenged again, and the 0:3 result made the chess players completely dead.
People also realize that Fan Qi is not at fault, he is just a necessary "unlucky egg" in the process of AI sealing the gods in the field of Go. But Fan Li is not unlucky, he has witnessed, even participated in everything, he is also a part of the development of Go.