Fan Hui

Chinese-born French Go player

Fan Hui
Fan Hui winning for the 5th time at the Paris Meijin in 2005
Chinese	樊麾
Pinyin	Fán Huī
Born	(1981-12-27) 27 December 1981 (age 42) Xi'an, Shaanxi, China^[1]
Residence	France
Turned pro	1996
Rank	professional 2 dan

Fan Hui (Chinese: 樊麾; pinyin: Fán Huī; born 27 December 1981) is a Chinese-born French Go player.^[2] Becoming a professional Go player in 1996, Fan moved to France in 2000 and became the coach of the French national Go team in 2005.^[3] He was the winner of the European Go Championship in 2013, 2014^[4] and 2015.^[5] As of 2015, he is ranked as a 2 dan professional.^[5] He additionally won the 2016 European Professional Go Championship.^[6]

AlphaGo vs Fan Hui

In October 2015, Fan was defeated by the Google DeepMind AI program AlphaGo 5–0, the first time an AI has beaten a human professional player at the game without a handicap.^[7]^[8] Fan described the program as "very strong and stable, it seems like a wall. ... I know AlphaGo is a computer, but if no one told me, maybe I would think the player was a little strange, but a very strong player, a real person."^[8]

After his defeat, Fan Hui was hired to advise the AlphaGo team and provided a "sanity check" on Go theory. He served as a judge for the AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol match and observed it in person. He later helped compile commentaries on the matches on AlphaGo's website.^[9]

Fan is one of the authors of DeepMind's paper on AlphaGo Zero published in the journal Nature on 19 October 2017.^[10]

References

^ "谷歌围棋人工智能击败职业棋手樊麾：不犯错的对手太可怕" (in Chinese). Guancha.cn. 28 January 2016. Retrieved 20 October 2017.
^ "围棋人工智能面临最后瓶颈 PK李世石看好谁？" [Who was the Go AI's final challenger?]. Sina (in Chinese). 28 January 2016. Retrieved 29 January 2016.
^ "围棋不只是中日韩争霸,"荒漠地带"蕴藏火苗" (in Chinese). Nanjing Chenbao. 28 March 2014. Archived from the original on 31 January 2016. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
^ "第26届法国围棋大会交流与文化探索夏令营规程" (in Chinese). Sina.com. 18 January 2015. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
^ ^a ^b 59th WeiqiTV European Go Congress (PDF), European Go Congress, retrieved 28 January 2016
^ 1st European Professional Go Championship. Accessed February 18, 2016.
^ "Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion - BBC News". BBC. 27 January 2016. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
^ ^a ^b Elizabeth Gibney (27 January 2016), "Go players react to computer defeat", Nature, doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19255, S2CID 146868978
^ "Commentaries on AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol and AlphaGo vs. AlphaGo". Archived from the original on 2016-09-12. Retrieved 2017-01-13.
^ Silver, David; Schrittwieser, Julian; Simonyan, Karen; Antonoglou, Ioannis; Huang, Aja; Guez, Arthur; Hubert, Thomas; Baker, Lucas; Lai, Matthew; Bolton, Adrian; Chen, Yutian; Lillicrap, Timothy; Fan, Hui; Sifre, Laurent; Driessche, George van den; Graepel, Thore; Hassabis, Demis (19 October 2017). "Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge" (PDF). Nature. 550 (7676): 354–359. doi:10.1038/nature24270. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 29052630. S2CID 205261034.