Tencent Go AI “Jueyi” became famous in UEC Cup, and its road to the championship is reviewed!

According to Leifeng.com, Tencent Go AI "Jueyi" won the UEC Cup with 11 consecutive victories. The UEC Cup is the world's most authoritative computer Go competition. It started in Japan in 2007 and is the most traditional and authoritative computer Go competition. Every year, high-level AI from various countries are invited to compete in Tokyo to promote the exchange of related academic and technological knowledge. World-renowned computer Go programs such as Japan's DeepZenGo, France's "CrazyStone", and Facebook's "DarkForest" have won awards in the UEC Cup.

This year's 10th competition had 30 software participating. After entering the top 16 with a perfect record of seven games in the round-robin points competition on the 18th, "Jueyi" won the UEC Cup championship with a four-game winning streak in today's finals, and Japan's "DeepZenGo" won the runner-up. On March 26, "Jueyi" will also play a human-computer game with Japanese pioneer chess player Ichiriki Ryo in the "Electric Saint War" in Tokyo.

Jueyi’s Road to Winning the Championship

According to reports from Yihu Go and other media, Jueyi's path to the championship is as follows.

Top 16: Fine Art vs. Japan's Kugutsu

Although the opponent did not kill the big dragon, the gap between him and Jueyi was extremely large. Jueyi, playing with white, surrounded the large space on the top and then swallowed up the three pieces on the left, leading by about 50 points on the board. The black pieces were still at a disadvantage. In the words of Yang Dingxin, 5th Dan, "it was obviously a huge gap between the E-level level and the S-level Boss."

Top 8: Fine Art vs. South Korea’s “Stone Tornado”

Korean software is just like the Koreans, they are tough and never give up. In the middle of the game, Jueyi had already won, and the next hundred moves had nothing to do with the outcome. However, Jueyi seemed to deliberately reveal its flaws, and suddenly made a big spoon move in the endgame, eating several black pieces, which was astonishing. It is said that with Jueyi's level, it is impossible to make such a low-level mistake, but it did happen in actual combat. Is this Jueyi's way of declaring victory in a special way?

Semi-finals: Fine Art vs. Japan’s Rayn

Jueyi played with black against Rayn. In the opening game, both sides played powerful transitions, but Rayn showed no fear. However, in the battle on the left, Jueyi showed his terrifying fighting power, attacking, entangled and making no mistakes until the last blow. He once again performed a good show of slaying the dragon and entered the final.

Final Round: Fine Art VS Japan's Deepzengo

The finals started at 13:30 on the afternoon of the 19th, Beijing time. DeepZenGo played black first. Both sides adopted a very retro layout. Jueyi made a false move to trap three black pieces, while DeepZenGo decisively sacrificed pieces, and had a very good control of the overall situation. Although Jueyi took some advantage in the formation of the lower left corner of the chessboard, DeepZenGo surrounded the huge shape in the upper right corner and took the lead in the overall situation.

Just when everyone thought Jueyi was at a disadvantage, something unexpected happened. Jueyi was causing trouble in the upper right corner, and DeepZenGo was not alert to the local battle at all, resulting in a local fight. Jueyi used its absolute advantage in robbing to make the pieces alive, and the black pieces collapsed instantly.

Fine Art wins the middle game against DeepZenGo with white pieces

From Weigo to Fine Art, Tencent has been accumulating strength for a year

It is reported that the name "Fine Art" has a strong Chinese ancient charm. Its English name is FineArt, which comes from the poem "Re-send Quatrains" by Tang Dynasty poet Du Mu - There are few people in the world with such extraordinary skills as you, and there are no idle people like me in the world. After we parted, on a snowy night with bamboo window, a lamp lights up and darkens the map of Wu.

The "Fine Art" project originated from the idea of ​​Tencent Vice President Yao Xing, and was led by Tencent AI Lab Senior Director and Expert Engineer Liu Yongsheng. Yao Xing believed that this would help train the team's R&D capabilities, and that it would have great application prospects related to Tencent. "Fine Art" was developed by a 13-person team at Tencent AI Lab over a year.

On March 4, 2016, the first DEMO was completed, and the player's chess skills were around amateur level 5. By late March, the Go AI project was officially launched and named weigo.

In August 2016, Jueyi played chess on the Yehu platform for the first time using the ID “虎虎有活力”. On August 23, it defeated a professional chess player for the first time. On September 4, Jueyi won 8 games in a row against a netizen named tby using the ID “野狐扫地僧”. tby is the account of Kong Lingwen, the eldest son of Nie Weiping.

On November 1, Jueyi officially debuted on Yihu with the ID "Jueyi", and on November 2, he defeated world champion Jiang Weijie (Yihu ID Ruoshui Yunhan) for the first time.

On the evening of November 19, Jueyi played against Ke Jie for the first time, winning one and losing one; on November 28, Jueyi won 5 and lost 1 against South Korea's number one player Park Tinghuan.

However, Jueyi’s journey has not been smooth sailing. Leifeng.com previously reported that in February this year, Jueyi’s winning rate was close to 90%, but suddenly changed its style and was defeated by several chess players in a row.

At the time, some people speculated that human chess players had discovered a serious bug in the Jueyi system, which led to several consecutive losses and the system was taken offline for adjustments. Jueyi later returned to the stage and dominated the competition, which was the result of deepening its residual network and retraining it.

On March 3, we saw Jueyi promoted to "10th dan". The so-called "10th dan" is based on the built-in system of the Yehu Go platform, because at this time Jueyi has defeated many domestic and foreign masters: Korean chess player Yin Junxiang (clover77), Fan Yunruo (Morning in the North Sea), Gu Li (Xingxiu Laoxian), Dang Yifei (I Want to Be Quiet), Chen Yaoye (Mystery), Lian Xiao (Sword Passing Silently), Mi Yuting (Doomsday), Hu Yaoyu (Feng Qingyang), Korean chess player Park Tinghuan (maker), Gu Zihao (Indianapolis King). The famous Chinese Go player Gu Li also recognized this "10th dan".

Although there was no definite news confirming that Jueyi was a Tencent project at that time, the outside world had basically guessed it was almost correct.

Leifeng.com learned that Gu Li, who had played against Jueyi, once hinted on Weibo that Jueyi was actually an artificial intelligence created by Tencent's AI team . At that time, someone broke the news in Gu Li's Weibo comment section: Weigo from Tencent's AI team was on the list of applicants for the Japanese UEC Computer Go Competition to be held from March 18 to 19, 2017. Today we know that this Weigo has been upgraded to the current "Jueyi".

Tencent flexes its technological muscle with AI “Jueyi”

According to the Jueyi team, Jueyi's learning method consists of two parts. One part comes from human chess records, which are trained through deep convolutional networks to obtain a strategy network. The second part is self-playing chess records, which are also trained through deep convolutional networks to obtain a valuation network.

The R&D team said that the development of "Fine Art" has enabled the team to review its AI algorithm research, large-scale computing platforms, and engineering capabilities over the past few years, and has made many valuable explorations and innovations in popular AI research fields such as deep learning and reinforcement learning. From a technical perspective, the artificial intelligence technology behind Fine Art is the ability to "make precise decisions" and has a very broad application scenario, such as unmanned driving , quantitative finance, and assisted medical care.

Among the three major Internet companies BAT, Tencent has always been the most low-key when it comes to artificial intelligence technology. It goes without saying that Baidu's three major laboratories invest 10 billion resources every year. Alibaba recently launched the AI ​​technology output project "NASA". In comparison, Tencent is much quieter. Although Tencent has also established laboratories such as Tencent Youtu and AI Lab, it always lacks an impressive event to showcase its AI technology strength. This time, "Jueyi" participated in the internationally renowned computer Go competition and won the world championship, successfully filling the gap of this "impressive event".

In the near future, Fine Art will play against real Japanese masters. Although this method of demonstrating technical strength is not new and follows the old path of DeepMind, it is also safe and convincing. Robin Li once said that Baidu is the "national team of deep learning". Tencent AI won the championship in this international competition, and the "national team of deep learning" has added another member!