Fan Hui | |
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![]() Fan Hui winning for the 5th time at the Paris Meijin in 2005 | |
Chinese | 樊麾 |
Pinyin | Fán Huī |
Born | Xi'an, Shaanxi, China [1] | 27 December 1981
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]
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]