AlphaGo AI unleashed on online Go players in secret; slays them all

The AI had previously defeated Go world champion Lee Sedol in a 5-game match, reports Tech in Asia

You might have thought that the folks at DeepMind were done after its AI, AlphaGo, beat South Korean Go world champion Lee Sedol in a five-game match. But AlphaGo apparently isn’t done yet. The team at DeepMind revealed Thursday that it unleashed a new version of AlphaGo on the online Go community in secret.

AlphaGo, secretly playing under the usernames "Magister" and "Master", smashed pretty much everyone it went up against. Playing top-tier opponents like Chinese 9 dan professional Nie Weiping, the AI managed an incredible 54-0 record.  

Korean master Lee Changho is the only Go player in the world with more international titles than Lee Sedol, and Chinese champion Gu Li has the most continental titles. If AlphaGo can beat either or both of those players, a very strong argument could be made that the best Go player on earth is no longer a human. 

Traditionally, Go has been difficult for AI programmes to handle because of a computer science concept called pruning.

Basically, to decide on a move in any two-player game, a human (or AI) needs to think about their potential moves, then the opponent’s potential responses to each of those potential moves, and the potential response to those responses, and so on. Each potential move branches out with more and more possible repercussions as one looks further into the future. If you put all of those branches together and think of them as a tree, pruning is exactly what it sounds like: cutting out some of the branches so that there are fewer that must be assessed before a final decision on a move can be made. This article was published on Tech In Asia. You can read it here.