Alpha Go to take on world’s number one Go player in China

Artificial intelligence software vs. humans to highlight five-day festival
April 10, 2017

The world’s number one Go player, Ke Jie (far right) and associates have recreated the opening moves of one of AlphaGo’s games with Lee Sedol from memory to explain the beauty of its moves to Google CEO Sundar Pichai (second from left) during a visit Pichai made to Nie Weiping’s Go school in Beijing last year (credit: DeepMind)

DeepMind’s Alpha Go AI software will take on China’s top Go players in “The Future of Go Summit” — a five-day festival of Go and artificial intelligence in the game’s birthplace, China, on May 23–27, DeepMind Co-Founder & CEO Demis Hassabis announced today (April 10, 2017).

The summit will feature a variety of game formats involving AlphaGo and top Chinese players, specifically designed to explore the mysteries of the game together, but “the centerpiece of the event will be a classic 1:1 match of three games between AlphaGo and the world’s number one player, Ke Jie, to push AlphaGo to its limits,” Hassabis said.

The festival will also include a forum on the “Future of A.I.” in which leading experts from Google and China will explore “how AlphaGo has created new knowledge about the oldest of games, and how the technologies behind AlphaGo, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are bringing solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges into reach.”

In January 2016, the AlphaGo deep learning computer system was the first computer program to defeat a Go champion, Korean Lee Sudow, shocking many observers of the game and marking a major breakthrough for AI.

DeepMind was founded in London in 2010 and backed by successful tech entrepreneurs. Having been acquired by Google in 2014, it is now part of the Alphabet group.