"Kisei" Nie Weiping, the ninth-dan player and professor Liu Zhiqing from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications were invited to Siming campus of Xiamen University on the night of May 16. They attended the event "2017 Xiamen Go-Chess and Artificial Intelligence Conference--Nie Weiping Xiamen Tour" co-sponsored by the General Alumni Association, Youth League committee, Student Affairs Office of Xiamen University.
Lin Dongwei, deputy secretary of Party Committee and vice president of the General Alumni Association of Xiamen University extended welcome to all the distinguished guests. He said that Go-chess was the quintessence of Chinese culture and artificial intelligence was an important frontier subject. Both of them had benefits for training students' scientific thinking method and capacity. He also noted that Xiamen University was not only a school with deep Go-chess atmosphere that held many Go-chess matches every year, but also a school that went in forefront in artificial intelligence and that got good results in the fields like expert system, natural language processing and machine translation. He hoped that faculties and students present there could take the opportunity to enlighten themselves by consulting masters and become the pillars of the country by working hard.
Nie Weiping shared with students his experiences of coming to Xiamen to attend the national Go-chess competition and encouraged them to have bold will and spirit. When it came to the question, whether the artificial intelligence could beat a human player, Nie referred to his own experience of playing with AlphaGo and answered frankly that AlphaGo was so skilled and infallible that it was very unlikely to lose. Therefore, he held a negative attitude towards the match between Ke Jie and AlphaGo in Wuzhen on May 23. However, looking from the positive side, he believed that the "out of bounds" artificial intelligence could inspire human players and the social concern generating by man-machine war was also very beneficial to the popularization and development of Go-chess.
Liu Zhiqing briefly explained the principles and processes of how AlphaGo beat human player to students. In response to the interesting question, whether artificial intelligence would develop independent consciousness and eventually become uncontrollable, he said that although artificial intelligence could outplay human in some specific field, it would always be an auxiliary tool because it did not have independence consciousness.
This event is part of a series of 2017 Xiamen Go-Chess and Artificial Intelligence Conference, attracting nearly 500 alumni, students and teachers from various colleges to participate in. In the question-and-answer session, students actively asked questions to the guests and their answers obtained wild applause from time to time.
