Chinese Go player Wang Haoyang (R) has a contest with a Japanese artificial intelligence program, June 21, 2017. (Photo/Beijing Youth Daily)
(ECNS) -- Chinese Go player Wang Haoyang defeated DeepZenGo, a Japanese artificial intelligence program, on Wednesday in the 3rd MLily Cup World Go Open Tournament, bringing new hope to human players of the ancient Chinese board game.
DeepZenGo, a joint effort between a software developer and Tokyo University researchers, reportedly adopts the latest AI technology to acquire a high level of skills in the game of Go. Its developer Hideki Kato, representing the AI program and playing the black pieces, resigned at the 252th hand of the competition and failed to progress to round 16.
Everything looked fine at the beginning of the contest until the machine made mistakes in the middle of the game.
DeepZenGo's performance "did not meet my expectations," said Kato, who believes a program bug was caused by technical problems, adding that a misjudgment made the machine confused whether to win or lose.
World top-ranked player Ke Jie sent his congratulations to Wang after the game. The 19-year-old talent insisted on figuring out the weaknesses of DeepMind's Go-playing program AlphaGo and has tried to defeat the machine after he lost a battle in Wuzhen last month.
Wang said he had been defeated by DeepZenGo on Internet games before. But these games were fast, and the contest was slow. Human players normally do better in slow games.
It was not the first time that DeepZenGo was defeated by a human. In a human vs machine contest in March, DeepZenGo lost to Chinese Go player Mi Yuting because the machine again failed to distinguish whether to win or lose. There is still a long way to go for the Japanese AI program to catch up with AlphaGo, experts said.
