Shin Jin-seo, a professional Go player. (Yonhap)
Shin Jin-seo, the world’s top-ranked professional Go player, once again beat an artificial intelligence program in a two-stone handicapped match. The performance by the 26-year-old with a 9-dan rank showed that human strategy is still effective in matches against machines.Playing as black, Shin won by 11.5 points on Tuesday against KataGo, the world’s current top Go AI program, in the third match of the Ssen Math-Hankyung Gisin Championship at the Hankyung TV studio in Seoul’s Jung District.Tuesday’s win gave Shin a 2-1 head-to-head against KataGo. He became the first player to win twice in a row in an official match with a handicap against an AI program — a feat achieved at a time when AI has made huge advancements since fellow 9-dan player Lee Se-dol scored 1 win and 4 losses against AlphaGo 10 years earlier.Shin lost the first match on July 17, having been caught off guard by the AI program’s unpredictable first move.But he went on to win the second by 4.5 points. His third match win on Wednesday was a rout, as Shin controlled play from start to finish.Shin Jin-seo began Game 3 with the privilege of placing two opening stones, a handicap giving him an advantage of about 18.5 points. The advantage might appear large — but a margin of 18.5 points is relatively small against an AI program that routinely scores 100-point moves.The program’s computational capabilities mean that a single error could prove fatal. Ahead of the match, the 9-dan player Shin warned that it “will get risky” if his odds fall below 98%.
