By Yu Xiaodong
AI in China
Photo by cfp
AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence programme developed by Google, has just won the first of three games against China’s Go prodigy Ke Jie in Hainan. This follows Alpha Go’s defeat of Lee Sedol, another top player of this ancient board game in March 2016. With its complicated positioning and endless possibilities, Go is supposed to be more difficult than chess for AI programme to master.
But AlphaGo has also got other competitors in China. One of them is Jueyi, or FineArt, developed by Chinese tech giant Tencent. After winning 10 straight games against Ke Jie, the world’s No. 1 player, in February, Jueyi won the championship title in the 10th Computer Go UEC Cup in Japan in March. Although AlphaGo was absent, the event attracted 30 of the world’s best Go AI programmes, including Facebook’s Darkforest, Japan’s Deep Zen Go and France’s Crazy Stone.
Jueyi represents the rising ambitions of Chinese tech companies in the emerging field of artificial intelligence, previously dominated by US companies.