Google's AI-powered AlphaGo defeats the best human Go players, retires from competitive sports

Google’s artificial intelligence-powered AlphaGo has defeated a team of five leading Go players in a demonstration match. Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players, in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The team included champions like Chen Yaoye, Zho Ruiyang, Mi Yuting, Shi Yue and Tang Weixing. The match ended when the human players resigned in the face of AlphaGo’s certain victory, TechCrunch reported on Friday. “This speaks volumes about where AI is headed — human players are teaming up with AlphaGo to have even more fun with the game!” Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO tweeted. Observers noted that the Go champions seemed to be enjoying observing and studying AlphaGo’s moves, and adapting their own play as a result. Following the victory, AlphaGo will retire from competitive sports. Marking the announcement, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis had this to say, “This week’s series of thrilling games with the world’s best players, in the country where Go originated, has been the highest possible pinnacle for AlphaGo as a competitive program. For that reason, the Future of Go Summit is our final match event with AlphaGo. The research team behind AlphaGo will now throw their energy into the next set of grand challenges, developing advanced general algorithms that could one day help scientists as they tackle some of our most complex problems, such as finding new cures for diseases, dramatically reducing energy consumption, or inventing revolutionary new materials.” With inputs from IANS