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WUZHEN, China — A computer defeated China’s top player of the ancient board game Go on Tuesday, earning praise that it might have finally surpassed human abilities in one of the last games that machines have yet to dominate.
Google’s AlphaGo won the first of three planned games this week against Ke Jie, a 19-year-old prodigy. The computer will face other top-ranked Chinese players during the five-day event.
AlphaGo beat Ke by a half-point, “the closest margin possible,” according to Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, the Googleowned company in London that developed AlphaGo.
AlphaGo has improved markedly since it defeated South Korea’s top competitor last year and is a “completely different player,” Ke told reporters.
“For the first time, AlphaGo was quite humanlike,” Ke said. “In the past it had some weaknesses. But now I feel its understanding of Go and the judgment of the game is beyond our ability.”
Go players take turns putting white or black stones on a rectangular grid with 361 intersections, trying to capture territory and each other’s pieces by surrounding them. Competitors play until both agree there are no more places to put stones or one quits.
The game, which originated in China more than 25 centuries ago, has avoided mastery by computers even as they surpassed humans in most other games. They conquered chess in 1997 when IBM Corp.’s Deep Blue system defeated champion Garry Kasparov.
Go, known as weiqi in China and baduk in Korea, is considered more challenging because the nearinfinite number of possible positions requires intuition and flexibility.
Players had expected it to be at least another decade before computers could beat the best humans.