Tencent Fine Art Artificial Intelligence Go program beats top human players after giving two stone handicap

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On 17th January, Fine Art, a Go playing computer made by Tencent, defeated human Go Champion Ke Jie 9P in 77 moves after giving two stones handicap on Foxweiqi. Ke Jie admitted that Fine Art’s was as strong as him after giving two stones handicap. After level-up on 10th January, Fine Art has played 34 games with professional players. All of the games were with two stones handicap, and FineArt won 30 games.

Aja Huang, the computer scientist who helps create Alphago and places stones for Alphago in the matches, also posted a moment and said: ”I have never imagined that I would be defeat by giving four stones handicap, but Master defeated me with 4 stones handicaps in slow games.” Maybe Go AI is getting close to Go God.

The International Go Federation reports that Fine Art played 34 games against professionals given a two-stone handicap, and won 30.

Wired magazine had reported on the Tencent Go AI program.

Tencent says the latest version of Fine Art drew inspiration from a paper by DeepMind last year about an improved version of AlphaGo called AlphaGo Zero. Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, and many other US companies have helped stoke the worldwide uptick of interest in AI by publishing research papers and releasing software packages.

Ingo Althöfer, a math professor and Go expert at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany, says that it has generally been held that a perfect “Go God” could beat the best human with a three-stone handicap. “Fine Art is trying to reach this limit of perfect play,” he says. Althöfer calls Ke Jie “likely the best human player currently.”