Google’s AlphaGo Retires From Beating Human Players

AI bows-out after comprehensively defeating the world’s greatest human Go players.

The AlphaGo Artificial Intelligence developed by Alphabet (Google) owned DeepMind, beat Chinese grand-master Ke Jie 3 games to 0 at the Future of Go Summit in the Wuhzen province of China earlier this month.

Ke Jie was merely the last in a long line of human players who have unsuccessfully tried to defeat AlphaGo. Jie is widely considered within the Go gaming community as perhaps the best player of all time. While it seemed all three of the matches could have gone either way at certain points, 19-year-old Jie was ultimately bested in each match.

The game of Go: Perhaps the world’s oldest and most deceptively complicated game.

Jie came close to defeating AlphaGo on several occasions, even using the AI’s own strategy against it at one point, but AlphaGo managed to counter attack with devastating efficiency each time. DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis stated after the match-up, that based on AlphaGo’s evaluations of Jie’s moves, the young Go wizard played almost perfectly. The AI however, just played slightly more perfectly.

I am retiring to spend more time with my family

If only. AlphaGo isn’t really being retired at all. Instead, DeepMind plans to challenge the AI with other complicated research efforts, using it to develop “advanced general algorithms” like “finding new cures for diseases, dramatically reducing energy consumption, or inventing revolutionary new materials.”

AlphaGo will next adapt itself to try and tackle some of society’s most complex problems, said the team behind DeepMind in a blog post. “If AI systems prove they are able to unearth significant new knowledge and strategies in these domains too, the breakthroughs could be truly remarkable. We can’t wait to see what comes next,” Hassabis said.