A more powerful version of AlphaGo defeated the world's number one Go player

In the first of several games being held in China this week, a revamped AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie, a Chinese grandmaster who currently ranks as the game's number one player. Besides demonstrating the software's mastery over the abstract and intuitive board game, the contest reveals how the machine-learning techniques that underpin AlphaGo are developing. DeepMind's Go Summit, held in the picturesque water town of Wuhzen, is also a significant event for its parent company, Alphabet. The company's dealings in China have been fraught ever since Google left the country, in 2010, in protest over censorship. And beyond this, it shows how strong the appetite for cutting-edge artificial intelligence is becoming in that country.