IT Blog

In the spring of 2017, a year after the match in Korea, AlphaGo played its next match, in Wuzhen, China, an ancient water town 80 miles south of Shanghai along the Yangtze River. With its lily ponds, stone bridges, and narrow boat canals that snaked between rows of small wooden houses topped by rock-tile roofs, Wuzhen is a village meant to look as it had centuries before. Then a 200,000-square-foot conference center rises up among the rice paddies. It looks a lot like the wooden houses spread across the village, except it’s the size of a soccer stadium. Its roof spans more than 2.5 trillion tiles. Built to host the World Internet Conference, an annual gathering where Chinese authorities trumpeted the rise of new internet technologies and marked the ways they would regulate and control the spread of information, it was now hosting a match between AlphaGo and the Chinese grand master Ke Jie, the current No.-1-ranked Go player in the world.

The morning of the first game, inside a…