IT’S man vs machine this week as Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo faces the world’s top-ranked Go player in a contest expected to end in another victory for the machine.

Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo took on the Chinese world number one of the ancient board game yesterday in the first of three planned games, beating its human opponent by a narrow margin.

It is the second time the AI has gone head-to-head with a master Go player in a public showdown, after stunning the world last year by trouncing South Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol four games to one.

AlphaGo, part of Google’s DeepMind project, competed against Ke Jie, currently ranked as the top player in the world, at an event held in the eastern Chinese water town of Wuzhen.

The software beat the master player by half a point, snatching victory by the narrowest margin possible in the game, a characteristic trait of the AI’s style of play.

AlphaGo will go up against Ke in two more matches slated for Thursday and Saturday this week.

Go, an ancient Chinese board game, is favored by AI researchers because of the large number of outcomes compared to other games such as Western chess.

Lee’s loss in Seoul marked the first time a computer program had beaten a top player in a full match in the 3,000-year-old Chinese board game, and has been hailed as a landmark event in the development of AI.

According to Google, there are more potential positions in a Go game than atoms in the universe.

Speaking ahead of the matches, Demis Hassabis, founder of London-based DeepMind that developed AlphaGo, said: “AlphaGo’s successes hint at the possibility for general AI to be applied to a wide range of tasks and areas, to perhaps find solutions to problems that we as human experts may not have considered.”

Ke was among many top Chinese players who were defeated in online contests in January by a mysterious adversary who reportedly won 60 straight victories.

That opponent, cheekily calling itself “The Master,” was later revealed by DeepMind to have been an updated AlphaGo.

Dai Weiyong, former chief of the electric information center of the General Administration of Sport of China, said AI could help people have a better participation in sports.

“The industrial automation has benefited everyone. With the help of AI, people may be better able to analyze and improve themselves with real things like replay rather than only relying on their memory or impression,” he said.

(SD-Agencies)