AlphaGo teaches to use AI to benefit humans

AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program, defeated China's top go player, 19-year-old Ke Jie, on Tuesday, the first day of five-day Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, East China's Zhejiang province. The best-of-three contest now seems tilted in favor of AlphaGo, as many go experts feared.

This is not the first time that AlphaGo, developed by Google Deep Mind, is facing a human opponent. In March 2016, AlphaGo scored a 4:1 victory against world champion Lee Sedol of the Republic of Korea. And in January this year, it won 60 matches in a row against top human players from China, the ROK and Japan on several online go platforms.

In the intervening four months, developers at Google have further improved AlphaGo. That's why the majority of observers are not confident about Ke winning the contest against AlphaGo. When Ke confirmed via his social media micro blog account that he would take on AlphaGo at the May 23-27 go summit in Wuzhen, one of the best comments in the more than 4,600 "likes" was: "Ke, you are facing mission impossible; we are proud of you!"