Alpha Go supercomputer beat Korea’s Lee Sedol 4-1 in the Go game

South Korea announced today that it plans to spend over 100 billion won (87 billion U.S. dollars) in fiscal funds for the next 10 years to develop supercomputers having a better capability than Google’s Go-playing computer program AlphaGo.

Xinhua, the Chinese news agency quoted South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning that about 10 billion won of fiscal funds will be invested annually in the next 10 years to develop the supercomputers for artificial intelligence (AI), big data and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies.

The first state-run supercomputer development project in South Korea came as the 4-1 victory last month of AlphaGo over South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol at the Chinese board game Go raised needs for development of AI.

Under the state-level project, South Korea plans to develop a one-petaflop supercomputer by 2020, aiming to eventually produce a 30-petaflop computer by 2025.

A petaflop is a unit used in supercomputers to gauge a speed, in which a quadrillion digits can be processed per second.

A one-petaflop supercomputer is used in South Korea for public sectors such as predicting natural disasters, estimated to be 3-5 times faster in data processing than AlpahGo.