Google’s Go-playing AI has won its second game against the world’s best player of the ancient Asian board game, Chinese 19-year-old Ke Jie, taking the three-game match in the process.
AlphaGo, the AI created by Google subsidiary DeepMind, reported that Ke’s first 50 moves were “played perfectly”, according to DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis. In the post-game press conference, Hassabis, who was a child chess prodigy, said: “For the first 100 moves, it was the closest we’ve ever seen anyone play against the Master version of AlphaGo.”
“Ke Jie pushed AlphaGo right to the limit,” Hassabis added on Twitter.
#AlphaGo wins game 2. What an amazing and complex game! Ke Jie pushed AlphaGo right to the limit.
— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) May 25, 2017
After narrowly losing the first match, a visibly shaken Ke had described AlphaGo’s latest version as “godlike”. This time, he was more relaxed: “Today’s game was different from the first. AlphaGo made some moves which were opposite from my vision of how to maximise the possibility of winning. I also thought I was very close to winning the game in the middle but maybe that’s not what AlphaGo was thinking. I’m a little bit sad, it’s a bit of a regret because I think I played pretty well.”
The victory indisputably marks AlphaGo’s ranking as better than any human player alive today, just over a year after it was first revealed to the world in an article published in the scientific journal Nature. Following its debut, a victory behind closed doors against professional Go player Fan Hui, the AI went on to compete in a widely publicised match against Korea’s Lee Sedol. Sedol, the Roger Federer of Go, lost the match four games to one.
AlphaGo is playing Ke as part of the “Future of Go” summit held by Google in China this week. As well as the third game between the pair, held on Saturday, Google is also putting AlphaGo through a pair of exhibition matches designed to test the limits of its performance: in one, the AI will be acting as team-mate to a pair of professionals playing against each other, taking every other turn in an effort to see how the AI and humans adapt to each other’s style of play; in the other, it will take on five professionals working in concert to try and outfox it.
Even though the matches are being held in China, Chinese residents won’t be able to watch them live. The state has sent out a censorship notice to online broadcasters, warning them against carrying any live coverage of Ke’s matches. YouTube, where Google is hosting the official feed, is also blocked in the country.
