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Huawei plans to help shape the intelligent world by focusing on key research areas. Find out what they are.
By 36Kr
On May 11, 1997, IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue caused a sensation throughout the world when it defeated the then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. It was hard to imagine that Deep Blue was a giant that weighed 1,270 kilograms, had 32 brains (microprocessors), and could perform 200 million calculations per second, with a computing power of 11.38 GFLOPS.
On March 15, 2016, AIphaGo, Google's Go-playing AI, won the final match in a five-part man-machine series of matches against then world Go champion Lee Sedol, beating Sedol four matches to one. According to Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan, AlphaGo's computing power is 30,000 times that of IBM's Deep Blue. Today’s most powerful modern supercomputers boast hundreds of thousands of times more computing power than Deep Blue. In fact, any laptop has more computing power than Deep Blue, showing how quickly computing power has progressed over the past 20 years.
Kai-Fu Lee said that chess is considered as a standard for testing the level of an AI. Go has 300 more times the possible plays than chess, so if AI can defeat the best human Go players, that indicates that the development of AI has entered a new stage. To many observers, AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol heralded the dawn of the AI era. Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt said that no matter who wins the game, it is actually a victory for humans.