Revamped AlphaGo Wins First Game Against Chinese Go Grandmaster

In the first game of his match with AlphaGo--the Go-playing machine built by researchers at Google's DeepMind lab--Chinese grandmaster Ke Jie opened with a move lifted straight from the arsenal of this artificially intelligent machine. He aimed to beat AlphaGo with its own unusual style of play. But the ploy didn't quite work as the 19-year-old grandmaster planned. After a four hours and fifteen minutes of play, Ke Jie resigned, and AlphaGo grabbed a 1-0 lead in this best-of-three match. Last year, in South Korea, AlphaGo topped the Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, becoming the first machine to beat a professional Go player--a feat that most AI researchers believed was still years away, given the extreme complexity of the ancient Eastern game. Now, AlphaGo is challenging Ke Jie, the current world number one, and according to Demis Hassabis, the CEO and founder of DeepMind, the machine is underpinned by a new and more powerful architecture suited to not just to Go but a wide range of real-world applications.