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Google's AlphaGo AI Secretively Won More Than 50 Straight Games Against World's Top Go Players (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: When Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo made history by taking down Korea's Lee Sedol -- one of the world's best Go players -- in a landslide 4-1 victory in March, Chinese player Ke Jie was skeptical. He famously wrote on Weibo the next day, "Even if AlphaGo can defeat Lee Sedol, it can't beat me," and has since agreed to take on the AI at an undecided time. But now even Ke, the reigning top-ranked Go player, has acknowledged that human beings are no match for robots in the complex board game, after he lost three games to an AI that mysteriously popped up online in recent days. The AI turned out to be AlphaGo in disguise. On Jan. 4, after winning more than 50 games against several of the world's best Go players, Ke included, a user registered with an ID of "Master" on two Chinese board game platforms came forward to identify itself as AlphaGo. "I'm AlphaGo's Doctor Huang," the user "Master" wrote on foxwq.com, according to screenshots from Chinese media reports. Taiwanese developer Aja Huang is a member of Google's DeepMind team behind the AI. Since Dec. 29, Master has defeated a long list of top Go players including Korea's Park Jung-hwan (world No. 3), Japan's Iyama Yuta (No. 5) and Ke in fast-paced games. He won 51 games straight before his 52nd rival, Chen Yaoye, went offline, forcing the game to be recorded as a tie. By Jan. 4 when the test was completed, Master had racked up 60 wins, plus the one tie, and zero loss, according to numerous reports (link in Chinese).
I'll be impressed when you write an AI that can competently play Civ5.
Knowingly or not, you actually wrote a very legitimate (and probably harder) problem in AI. How do you make a good AI opponent? Note this is a different question than what was done in Go recently, which is "make a computer program as skilled as possible."
You need to make an AI which will make mistakes, pretend like it doesn't know everything about the universe, including the player's civilization state (see The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard trope and related tropes within that article), have multiple civilizations acting independently of each other, be "good" enough to provide a challenge but not good enough to be unbeatable, act "realistically" given the supposed limited information it has, etc...
Making an unbeatable AI in a game in many ways is easier than making a good AI opponent. As a thought experiment, consider the game tic-tac-toe. I'm sure I could make an unbeatable AI pretty easily... but I don't think I could make an AI which was hard-yet-beatable, especially if somebody would be playing against it dozens of times so I couldn't just hard-code moves.
You seemed have to missed the fact that many of the top professional players were lining up to play against this bot. They view it as free training lession, not to beat an AI bot, but to beat their human counter parts. Since Lee Sedol played against AlphaGo, he has gained in strength, so much even that a certain point, using a certain method, AlphaGo was the strongest player, not because it had played more games, but because Lee Sedol had won so many games. Ke Jie, to be considered the strongest player at the moment, has made remarks that humans have only touched at the truth behind go, after he played against Master(P). Most go players have a very high regard for the game, as they sense that it is much deeper than human mind can consider. For this reason, I guess, many professional go players find this a very exicting time, because it will enhance their understanding of the game. In this view it is very unlikely that a professional player will use a trick to force a tie.