Computer beats world’s best board game player

A computer has defeated the world’s best player of the 2,500-year-old board game Go.

Google’s Alphago won the first of three planned games this week against Ke Jie, a 19-year-old prodigy, in Wuzhen, China.

The computer will also face other top-ranked Chinese players during a five-day event.

It beat Ke by a half-point, “the closest margin possible,” according to Demis Hassabis, founder of Deepmind, the Google-owned company in London that developed Alphago.