In China, the scoreboard reads: Computers, 2. Humans, 0. – Washington Post

By Associated Press By Associated Press May 25 at 11:59 AM

A computer beat Chinas top player of go, one of the last games machines have yet to master, for a second time Thursday, a sign that the field of artificial intelligence is advancing faster than expected.

An IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. But many go players expected it to be at least 10 more years before computers mastered go, which is considered far more complicated for machines to master.

Go players take turns putting white or black stones on a rectangular grid with 361 intersections, trying to capture territory and each others pieces by surrounding them. The near-infinite number of possible positions requires intuition and flexibility traits that human beings long believed a computer could never possess.

But then European and South Korean go champions began to fall to Googles AlphaGo computer program. The program defeated Ke Jie (pronounced kuh jay), a 19-year-old Chinese prodigy, on Tuesday and then again two days later, during an artificial-intelligence forum that Google organized in the Chinese city of Wuzhen (woo-jen).

Ke lost despite playing what AlphaGo indicated was the best game any opponent has played against it.

What happened? Ke said his loss was probably the result of something all too human: emotion.

I thought that I was very close to winning the match in the middle, Ke said. I could feel my heart thumping. But maybe because I was too excited, I did some wrong or stupid moves. I guess thats the biggest weak point of human beings.

[Not even the best go players feel they have mastered the game]

He and AlphaGo play a final game Saturday in a country where go is extremely popular. Google says 60 million people in China watched online when AlphaGo played South Koreas go champion in March 2016.

This time, Chinese censors blocked most of the countrys Web users from seeing the Google site carrying the feed. None of Chinas dozens of video sites carried the live broadcasts but a recording of Tuesdays game was available the next night on one popular site.

The government encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to block access to material considered subversive, or rebellious. Social media and video-sharing websites such as Facebook and YouTube are blocked, and Internet companies are required to have teams of censors to watch social media and remove banned material.

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In China, the scoreboard reads: Computers, 2. Humans, 0. - Washington Post