"Godlike" Artificial Intelligence Just Officially Beat The World's #1 Go Player

By the end of this week, it's a good bet that the world's best player of the ancient Chinese board game Go will no longer be a human being. The Chinese Go champion, 19-year-old Ke Jie - ranked number one in the world - was just narrowly beaten by Google DeepMind's AlphaGo in the first of a three-match series, and if the algorithm's winning form keeps up, it'll be a watershed moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI). The latest win, played in the Chinese city of Wuzhen on Tuesday, cements AlphaGo's steady rise to the peak of the professional Go-playing circuit, after celebrated victories over European Go champion Fan Hui in 2015 and South Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol last year. After those decisive tournaments, won by AlphaGo 5-0 and 4-1 respectively, it's possible Ke had even less a chance of beating the system than his human predecessors. DeepMind's developers say the tweaked and revamped AI is now more efficient than ever, using 10 times less computational power than the algorithm that trounced Sedol in 2016.