Agronesia

Go is a board game with very simple and elegant rules, but with a mathematical complexity far far above chess. It is a game with lots of pattern recognition involved, so a skilled human player is particularly good at intuitively making judgments just by glancing a position.

We all know how Gary Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue some time ago, so in essence computers now can play better chess than human. Go, with its enormous computational complexity, is regarded by many as the last bastion to defend human intelligence in strategy games.

Around 5 years ago, the best computer program can still be defeated by a professional even with a 25 stone handicap (e.g., getting free 25 moves at the start of the game). Now it plays much much better, and at the recent U.S. Go Congress (7 August 2008) a supercomputer beat a professional player at 9 stone handicap. Here’s the details of the match:

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This is not exactly new stuff, but I just recently found it.

Chimpanzees are known as a highly intelligent animal. They use stone and wooden tools, hunt in coordination, and can be taught limited sign language. What might be surprising is that on a particular intellectual test devised by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, young chimps outperforms university students.

Here’s a simple explanation of the test, which is actually a fun game:

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