The world’s No.1 weiqi (Go) player Ke Jie lost the contest against his artificial intelligence (AI) rival, AlphaGo, in the third and also final match of the summit on Saturday

The world’s No.1 weiqi (Go) player Ke Jie lost the contest against his artificial intelligence (AI) rival, AlphaGo, in the third and also final match of the summit on Saturday

This match began at 10:30 BJT in Wuzhen, east China’s Zhejiang Province, with AlphaGo playing the black and Ke white

Ke showed his brilliant weiqi skills as he said he will “fight till the end,” though he lost his previous two matches against AlphaGo on Tuesday and Thursday

AlphaGo made the first “impolite” move as it did on Thursday – to put the black stone on the bottom-right corner of the weiqi board. It is a Chinese tradition that the first stone is usually placed around the top-right corner and this is what weiqi coaches always teach beginners

“I think the black already wins,” said Nie Weiping, vice president of the Chinese Weiqi Association, and a Chinese weiqi legend, one hour after the match

Just like Ke, Nie thinks AlphaGo is much stronger than any human player

“I don’t think the match has any meaning because the huge capability gap between the two sides left no doubt who will win,” said Nie. “AlphaGo is a machine. The gap between human player and AlphaGo, for example, is like a race competition, in which we human players are like a bike or car, but AlphaGo is a plane, or even a spacecraft.”

Nie reckoned AlphaGo should be a coach for weiqi players as there is much to learn from the AI program’s unusual moves in the three matches