DeepMind on Thursday afternoon confirmed that a “new prototype version” of AlphaGo has been the mystery player playing
as Master and Magister on the Tygem and FoxGo servers, defeating more than 50 of the top go players in the world.
“We’ve been hard at work improving AlphaGo,” DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis tweeted, “and over the last few days we’ve played some unofficial online games at fast time controls with our new prototype version, to check that it’s working as well as we hoped.” Hassabis went on to say that “We’re excited by the results and also by what we and the Go community can learn from some of the innovative and successful moves played by the new version of AlphaGo.”
“Having played with AlphaGo, the great grandmaster Gu Li posted that ‘Together, humans and AI will soon uncover the deeper mysteries of Go”. Now that our unofficial testing is complete, we’re looking forward to playing some official full-length games later this year in collaboration with Go organisations and experts, to explore the profound mysteries of the game further in this spirit of mutual enlightenment. We hope to make further announcements soon!”
In addition to the Top 5 placing in the poll of Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) magazine’s readers, AlphaGo was listed as the 10th most important scientific event in 2016 by Science News Magazine (Society for Science and the Public).
Note: Tobias Berben has posted 41 of the game records here.
