Chinese Go player denies cheating allegations

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Liu Chao stunned a high-ranking Hu Yuqing, “the king of Go”, in the China’s amateur Go competition in the eastern province of Zhejiang on Tuesday, but other players suggested Liu was following the advice of LeelaZero, an artificial intelligence (AI) software in the phone.

Liu, then, quit the game, denied the accusation and said he would never play the game.

“They have no evidence,” said Liu, “I often put my phone in that pocket and I believed lots of people have such habit.”

A photo online has shown that Liu put his phone in the shirt pocket while the camera was facing the board during the first and second round of the game. He lost the next round after he was asked to put the phone into the trouser pocket or somewhere else.

The photo shows the camera facing the board during the game. /Photo via Weibo

He told Beijing News that many people surrounded him to pressurize, leading him to quit the game.

Beijing Youth Daily quoted Liu as saying that had used LeelaZero for practice.

Besides the position of the camera, some netizens also doubted that Liu’s strategies matched with the software.

Liu accepted that his tactics might have been similar to the software.

Go, also known as Weiqi in Chinese, is played on a 19x19 grid board by two opponents, which is regarded as a far more difficult game for a computer to master since it heavily relies on intuition and strategic thinking.

The organizer, Lishui City Hall, and China’s Weiqi Association, which will rewrite the regulation on banning AI use for the competition, claimed that they did not have enough evidence showing that Liu had cheated and they also had no right to check the phone.

However, they also said that Liu's behavior appears to be against the rule, according to the video circulated on the Internet.

The staff told Beijing Youth News on Wednesday that several months before the competition the judges in the commission have talked about the possibilities of players using AI to cheat.

“We found that it is much more common to use the AI on a computer than on the smartphone. Still, the player who cheated will be banned from the game,” an association official said.