The Chinese Weiqi Association on March 15 suspended Liu Ruizhi from attending competitions overseas for a year after he violated the “no use of AI” rules when participating in a national chess competition earlier that day. According to the statement, Liu Ruizhi used an AI program during the first round of the Chinese professional Go Championship preliminaries, and his supervisors did not fulfill their supervisory responsibilities. According to the rules of the competition, the use of AI is strictly prohibited, and players who break this rule will be banned for one year. If the player is a member of the national training team, they will be expelled from the team immediately.
Zuo Shiquan, head of the equipment manufacturing research institute under the China Center for Information Industry Development, told the Global Times on Wednesday that AI can guide a player by calculating the next step after analyzing the historical data of contestants input in advance and that this counts as cheating during a match.
Liu Ruizhi was born in 1996; his career began in 2019, but he had not won any major matches during his career, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
The Chinese Professional Go Championship is a professional tournament with the longest history and the largest participation in China. A total of 231 people signed up for the competition – a new record – of which 194 participated in the preliminaries.
– adapted from a report by Chen Xi in the Global Times
