CGTN photo

After beating the best human Go player in the world, the buzz of AlphaGo seemed to be fading away as an artificial intelligence (AI) player. But some AI scientists are still interested in the game's AI development.

In the first World AI Go Open, a two-day AI and Go conference held in Ordos City in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous by the International Go Federation, Japan's DeepZenGo beat a dark horse bot CGI from Taiwan, to win a prize of 200,000 yuan (about 30,000 US dollars).

Unlike modern human matches, AI programs tend to seek close fighting styles with each other. "It's more like ancient matches," said a fan on eweiqi.com. "But this characteristic makes the matches cool to watch," the fan added.

CGI kills DeepZenGo's 10 whites tones during the final match. /eweiqi.com Photo

During the final match on Thursday, DeepZenGo and CGI duked it out around the bottom-right corner of the board above. The battle was very close, and at one point, winning program DeepZenGo (in white) saw 10 dead stones.

Both programs raged on quickly across the board, so much so that commentators couldn't keep up with their rapid moves.

Most watchers thought CGI was leading during the first half of the match. But the dark horse made a serious mistake at step 203, which then handed the win to DeepZenGo.

The CGI team. /eweiqi.com Photo

Another strong contestant is the program Jueyi, or FineArt, from China, which won the third place after losing to DeepZenGo in the semifinals.

"Jueyi is definitely the strongest among the three (AI programs)", Wu Yicheng from National Chiao Tung University, developer of CGI told Sina after the game.

Wu, aiming for the third place after DeepZenGo and Jueyi before the open, was surprised to win second place.

Winner DeepZenGo will face nine-dan Go player Kong Jie in a "human vs robot" match on Friday.