Renowned Go player Lee Se-dol lost his five-game match with Google's AlphaGo computer program on Tuesday in Seoul, raising concerns about the formidable capability of artificial intelligence.

The best human Go player won only a single game against the program, which is powered by about 2,000 central processing units and 170 graphic processing units - generating a computing capability far superior to the human brain.

However, such hardware will soon be a thing of the past.

Chinese scientists have developed a neural network chip that is likely to pack AlphaGo's computing clusters into the size of a personal computer.

"Computers are doing much better than humans in terms of memorizing and calculating. However, their performance on solving some intelligence problems that require understanding, learning and reasoning is unsatisfactory," said Chen Yunji, a professor of the Institute of Computing Technology affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences who is a co-inventor of the chip.

In 2010, Chen and his younger brother Chen Tianshi, who also works for the institute, began to explore a new type of computer processor dedicated to machine learning.

The difference between a common chip - the CPU and GPU on personal computers - and a neural network chip is like the difference between a Swiss Army knife and a large chef's knife, Chen Tianshi said.

"The common chip on our computers can operate all different kinds of procedures, just like the Swiss Army knife has a variety of blades. But if you use a Swiss Army knife to cut meat, it will be much harder than using a special tool like the chef's knife," he said.

Similarly, it has been extremely difficult to run deep-learning algorithms, an essential artificial intelligence technology, with common chips.

The Chen brothers' neural network chip, called Hanwuji, is designed for better learning ability than general-purpose chips. By late 2014, both generations of the chip won ASPLOS Best Paper Awards, one of highest international awards in the computer research field.

The Chens are establishing a company in Beijing to mass-produce the chips.

chengyingqi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 03/16/2016 page3)