MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – After defeating a human player in the game of Go, Google’s Deepmind AlphaGo computer has also become the first computer to win a game of chess against Death.
“We’re thrilled that AlphaGo has been able to accomplish something that only a few human players have been able to do,” said Google programmer Raymond Ortiz. “Elvis Presley, Hazel McCallion, and now, AlphaGo.”
Although the game, played at Google’s in-house mausoleum, originally seemed to be in Death’s favour, AlphaGo managed to eke out victory through a series of daring and unorthodox moves. Experts say the turning point came when Death’s scythe became lodged in AlphaGo’s plexiglass screen.
Some bits of confetti and a balloon then fell from the ceiling, and the traditional prize for beating Death at chess, ‘to not die’, was waived in favour of a one hundred dollar gift certificate for Amazon.com.
“I am Death, I have no secrets, I am unknowing,” said Death, in a voice like a thousand-year winter. “Wait, what does that one mean. Oh, I see. It is the emoji for poop. I guess that Google did not program you for sportsmanship.”
While the programming team at Google said they had ‘learned a lot’ about how to further improve AlphaGo by studying the game, no new developments have been forthcoming, as the entire team has since come down with a case of Bubonic Plague.
At press time, AlphaGo’s combination of neural networks, machine learning and Monte Carlo tree search techniques had not helped it beat the Devil in a fiddle-playing competition.
