AlphaGo Does it Again – Beats Another World’s Top-Ranked Player in the Ancient Chinese Board Game

Nathan Ernest Olupot May 23, 2017

1 minute read

Chinese Go player Ke Jie puts a stone against Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo during their first match at the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, China May 23, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer

A year after South Korean grandmaster Lee Se-Dol was trounced to Google’s AlphaGo DeepMind AI – making it the first time in history a computer programme to beat a top player in a full contest, the AI is doing it again as it beat the world’s top-ranked player; a 19 year old Ke Jie in a 3000 year old ancient Chinese board game Go in the first of three planned games on Tuesday.

According to reports by Reuters, the game was streamed live on Google-owned video sharing platform; YouTube, while Executives from DeepMind that developed the program sent out updates live on micro-blogging website; Twitter.

With two more games left, Ke will face the AI once again on Thursday and Saturday.

“AlphaGo’s successes hint at the possibility for general AI to be applied to a wide range of tasks and areas, to perhaps find solutions to problems that we as human experts may not have considered,” Demis Hassabis, Founder at DeepMind said ahead of this week’s matches, NDTV news reports.

AI’s ultimate goal is to create general or multi-purpose, rather than narrow, task-specific intelligence something resembling human reasoning and the ability to learn.

Chinese Go player Ke Jie reacts during his first match with Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo at the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, China May 23, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer — Chinese Go player Ke Jie reacts during his first match with Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo at the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, China May 23, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer

For what we know, AI has previously beaten humans in cerebral contests, starting with IBM’s Deep Blue defeating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, but according to reports, AlphaGo’s win against Lee last year is considered the most significant win for AI as yet.

Notably, Go is most popular in countries such as China, South Korea and Japan, involves two contestants moving black and white stones across a square grid, aiming to seize the most territory. According to Reuters, the board game is favored by AI researchers because of the large number of outcomes compared to other games such as: chess.

Go is considered perhaps the most complex game ever devised, with an incomputable number of move options that puts a premium on intuition. And according to Google there are more potential positions in a Go game than atoms in the universe.