An AI gave a Go champ a head start—and still beat him

The Chinese tech firm Tencent has shown that its AI software can school humans at Go.

What’s new: Wired notes that Tencent’s Fine Art AI, built in 2016, recently beat the world’s number-two Go player, Ke Jie, at the ancient board game. That’s despite the fact that Jie was given a two-piece head start.

Backstory: Go is incredibly complex and was once considered a huge AI challenge. Then Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind famously beat the world’s best players with its AlphaGo software and later developed a self-learning version, called AlphaGo Zero, that is even better.