From baseball to taekwondo, Mandopop to K-pop, Foxconn to Samsung, Taiwan and South Korea have long shared a rivalry. So when Taiwanese amateur Aja Huang met Korean pro Lee Se-dol for a Go match with a million-dollar purse, Go fans in both nations were captivated.

Of course, Huang had some help—OK, a lot of help—from an artificial intelligence called AlphaGo, which he and his team of AI researchers at Google developed. Shockingly, the AI came out on top, four games to one.

Though some Taiwanese may feel a surge of national pride at this outcome, we should step back and look at the big picture: super-smart robots are coming to kill us all. Computers mastered checkers in 1994, chess in 1997, and now they can beat us at Go. What’s next? Let’s not find out. At times like this, Taiwanese and Koreans must lay aside their differences and fight the robots together. In the words of comic Demetri Martin: “My computer beat me at chess ... so I beat it at kickboxing.”

Translation

本土機器人棋高一著

從棒球到跆拳道、從華語流行音樂到韓國流行音樂、從鴻海到三星，台韓長期交手過招。於是乎，當台灣業餘棋士黃士傑在百萬獎金圍棋大賽上，對決韓國職業高手李世乭，台韓兩國圍棋迷心嚮往之。當然，黃士傑從他與他在 Google 人工智慧研究團隊所開發名為 AlphaGo 的人工智慧那邊，得到一些幫助——好啦，是天大的幫助。人工智慧技驚四座，以四勝一敗之姿勝出。