Top professional shogi player loses to computer program

Senin, 22 April 2013 01:03

(TOKYO-Kyodo) A top professional player of shogi, or Japanese chess, was beaten Saturday in a public match by a computer program, stunning the shogi world.

Hiroyuki Miura, 39, lost against the GPSShogi program, in the final of the five matches of this year's Shogi Master Versus Machine Match series. In the team competition, the humans lost three matches, won only once and drew one match.

Miura, who played without a handicap, held the upper hand early in the game but gradually lost his momentum from the middle of the game. Miura has been a top-ranked shogi player since 2001.

The first match was won by professional Koru Abe against a different computer program called the "Bonanza." But in the second and third matches, the shogi players, Shinichi Sato and Kohei Funae, were beaten. The fourth match with Yasuaki Tsukada ended in a draw.

After losing the game, Miura released a statement apologizing for "failing to fulfill his duty" in winning the game.

Tomoyuki Kaneko, a University of Tokyo associate professor who is a member of the team that developed GPSShogi, said he is "glad the computer functioned without any incident" but that he still "cannot feel real" about the victory.

In January 2012 the late Kunio Yonenaga, then a retired professional player, was beaten by the "Bonkuras" program written by a programmer at Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., while in 2007 active top shogi player Akira Watanabe beat the Bonanza program.