Communications of the ACM, Vol. 51, no. 10

Supercomputer Defeats Human Go Pro

The new Dutch supercomputer Huygens, armed with the MoGo Titan program, defeated a human professional Go player with a 9-stones handicap. The victory appears to be the first-ever defeat of a high level human Go player by a supercomputer in an official match. Until recently, scientists were unable to create a computer program capable of beating even many amateur level Go players. This state of affairs changed in 2006 when programmers Sylvain Gelly and Yizao Wang devised a revolutionary algorithm that has enabled the MoGo Titan program to attain new heights; since August 2006, MoGo Titan has been ranked number one on the 9x9 Computer Go Server. Teamed up with the Huygens supercomputer, MoGo Titan achieved a noteworthy victory as its opponent, Kim Myungwan, is an 8 dan pro (the highest level is 9 dan) and a seasoned international competitor. In fact, the day before Myungwan’s official match with Huygens and MoGo Titan, he soundly defeated the duo in three blitz games played with varying handicaps. “The current result forecasts that before 2020 a computer program will defeat the best human Go player on a 19x19 Go board in a regular match under normal tournament conditions,” says professor Jaap van den Herik of Maastricht University which, with INRIA France, co-developed MoGo Titan. “This is remarkable, since around 2000 it was generally believed that the game of Go was safe to any attack by a computer program. The 9-stones handicap victory casts severe doubts on this belief.” The Korean-born Myungwan appears to have taken the defeat well. Two days after his loss to MoGo Titan, he won the 2008 U.S. Open.

Consumers’ Invisible Profiles

Health and life insurance companies in the U.S. are increasingly using consumers’ prescription drug data to determine what type of coverage, if any, to offer applicants, the Washington Post reports. The insurance companies hire health information services companies—such as Ingenix, which had $1.3 billion in sales last year—to help create consumer profiles. The health information services companies mine the databases of prescription drug histories that are kept by pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which help insurers to process drug claims. (Ingenix even has its own servers located in some PBM data centers.) The health information services companies also access patient databases held by clinical and pathological laboratories. The health information services companies say that consumers have authorized the release of their records and that their approach saves insurance companies money and time. Privacy advocates note that consumers do sign consent forms authorizing the release of data, but they have to if they want insurance, and that many people are unaware of the existence of health information services companies.

Cooperative Robot Swarms

An enterprising group of undergraduate students at the University of Southampton unveiled a group of inexpensive and identical, matchbox-sized robots at the recent Artificial Life XI conference. The robots communicate with each other via an infrared technology used in mobile phones, and can independently divide up tasks, without instructions from a central control program. In a demonstration at the conference, the robots, which have green and red lights, autonomously divided themselves into two groups, 80% red and 20% green. When some of the “green” robots were removed from the group, the remaining robots reorganized into an 80/20 split. Swarms of robots have certain advantages over a single, self contained robot, according to some roboticists. “You might have some complex robot that is sent to Mars, has a technical problem, and then the mission is basically over,” said Claus-Peter Zauner, the leader of the swarm robot project, in an interview with the BBC News. “With swarm robots, even if a percentage of them fails, they’ll still be able to achieve their goal.”