AlphaGo, AI Designed To Play Board Game Go, Secretly Played And Beat Professionals Online

Fans of the strategy board game Go have secretly been guiena pigs in an experiment run by Google. The search giant has been sending its Go-playing artificial intelligence AlphaGo into online arenas to match up against players around the world—and it's been trouncing the competition.

AlphaGo crept into the online games hosted on Tygem and FoxGo servers—two popular hangouts for competitive Go players to match wits. Playing under the username Master or Magister, the AI began to rattle off win after win against some tough competition.

As its wins continued to pile up, Chinese professional Go player Gu Li offered up a 100,000 yuan (about $14,500) reward to anyone able to knock off Master.

Around the time it hit a record of 50 wins and zero losses, players started wondering if there was something other than another human behind the unbeatable account. On a subreddit dedicated to strategy games, theories of the Master account's true identity ranged from world Go champion Lee Sedol to a Chinese-built AI to, most improbably of all, the 1,000 year old spirit of a Go master from Japanese manga series Hikaru no Go.

While none of the guesses were quite correct, players were catching on to the oddly robotic way of playing Master exibited, and eventually came to the conclusion it likely wasn't a typical Go player.

Just days later, Demis Hassabis—the CEO of DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company that created AlphaGO—came clean on Twitter with an update outing Master as AlphaGo.

"Now that our unofficial testing is complete," Hassabis wrote, "we're looking forward to playing some official, full-length games later this year in collaboration with Go organizations and experts, to explore the profound mysteries of the game further in this spirit of mutual enlightenment."

The Go community was generally positive in its response, as many players of the game wanted to have the opportunity to go up against the AI that has come to master the game they love. "How about a big thank you to DeepMind for granting our collective wish for the past 9 months," one user wrote.

AlphaGo previously put together an impressive showing when faced against Lee Sedol, an 18-time world champion at the game of Go. The AI was able to win all but one of its games against the best human player the world had to offer, forcing Sedol to resign on four occasions in five total maches.