In any event, AlphaGo won the first game against Ke Jie, taking hold of play rather early in the match. "It is like a god of a Go player," the Chinese grandmaster said during the post-game press conference, through an interpreter. But for the machine, the second game was a slightly different prospect. Unlike in the first round, AlphaGo played the black stones, which means it played first, something it views as a small handicap. "It thinks there is a just a slight advantage to the player taking the white stones," AlphaGo's lead researcher, David Silver, said just before the game. And as match commentator Andrew Jackson pointed out, Ke Jie is known for playing well with white.
That said, AlphaGo typically overcomes that small handicap. After the match in Korea last year, the DeepMind team rebuilt the system, significantly improving the architecture, and in January, when it played several top players over the internet under the pseudonym "Master," it won all 60 of its games.
The new AlphaGo tends to play what experts previously viewed as an unusual opening, a strategy called "3-3 point." And indeed, it played the opening in today's game. In this way, the contest became a mirror image of game one. Ke Jie led with a "3-3 point" there, mimicking AlphaGo's new approach to this ancient game---though, for him, the gambit was not successful.
In the early stages of game two, however, Ke Jie seemed to hold his own. "Incredible," DeepMind founder and CEO Demis Hassabis tweeted about an hour into the game. "According to #AlphaGo evaluations Ke Jie is playing perfectly at the moment." Later, during the post-game press conference, Ke Jie said that he thought he had a chance of winning. "My heart was beating fast," he said. But as the match continued, according to match commentators, he seemed to lose ground in the lower half of the board. And soon, he started twisting the hair on his head.
By the game's third hour, the 19-year-old had used up about twice as much playing time as AlphaGo. He was on the verge of losing the lower half of the board. Early in the contest, Ke Jie had worked to create an enormously complicated game, but with a typically swift move as the four hour approached, AlphaGo made it simple again. "The fact that AlphaGo has simplified the game is a bad sign for the human player," said match commentator Michael Redmond. Within 15 minutes, Ke Jie resigned.
The last game of the series is set for Saturday. But before then, on Friday, the machine will play two others: one against at a team of top human players, and one alongside human players. And frankly, that's where the interest lies. Given AlphaGo's dominance, there's little mystery left when it goes head-to-head with the single grandmaster.
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