AlphaGo Is Back to Battle Mere Humans--and It's Smarter Than Ever

A computer wasn't supposed to be able to beat a grandmaster at the ancient game of Go for at least another decade. But AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent system designed by Google-owned DeepMind, did just that. In its public debut last year at a tournament in Seoul, AlphaGo thrashed Lee Sedol, the best player of last decade. Now AlphaGo is back, facing off in China against the world's top player to show just how much further machine-approximated intuition has advanced over the past year, and WIRED is there. Tomorrow morning, AlphaGo is set to play 19-year-old Ke Jie in Wuzhen, a town crisscrossed by canals 80 miles west of Shanghai.