Mysterious 'Master' claiming to be AlphaGo beats top Go players

The skills of a mysterious Go player, who claimed to be AlphaGo, were deemed to be beyond human reach after it defeated more than 50 top Go players in Asia, stirring a fresh concern about artificial intelligence (AI) surpassing humans in games.

So far, the player named "Master" has defeated 57 world-class Go players in many online Go platforms since December 29, 2016, including the best players from China, Japan and South Korea, such as Ke Jie, Yuta Iyama and Park Jeong-hwan. The player announced it is AlphaGo late Wednesday, news portal thepaper.cn reported.

Zhu Kai, a senior sport journalist from people.cn, told the Global Times on Wednesday that "Though 'Master' is a threat to humankind in the Go game, seeing from the perspective of Go as a culture, it's a good thing when multiple platforms are developing AI to further carry forward the culture."

"Thanks for the shock AlphaGo brought to the Go game ... though I knew the identity of Master from the beginning, I still strongly wished that a human can win when watching the games," Ke wrote on his Sina Weibo account on Wednesday.

"From now on, Go players will march toward new era with the application of computer," Ke wrote on his Weibo account Saturday.

Renowned Go legend Nie Weiping had insisted that the computer needs 50 years more to defeat human before the historic match between Google's AlphaGo and South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol on March 16, 2016.

AlphaGo beat Lee 4-1 in the best-of-five series.

Go - an ancient Chinese board game popular throughout East Asia - involves two contestants moving black and white stones on a square grid with the aim of seizing the most territory.

The most famous AI victory in a strategic board game to date came in 1997 when the IBM-developed supercomputer Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, the then world chess champion, in its second attempt.