Expert players are also noticing AlphaGo’s idiosyncrasies. Lockhart and others mention that it almost fights various battles simultaneously, adopting an approach that might seem a bit madcap to human players, who’d probably spend more energy focusing on smaller areas of the board at a time. According to Michael Redmond, the highest-ranked Go player from the Western world (he relocated to Japan at the age of 14 to study Go), humans have accumulated knowledge that might tend to be more useful on the sides and corners of the board. AlphaGo “has less of that bias,” he noted, “so it can make impressive moves in the center that are harder for us to grasp.”

Also, it’s been making unorthodox opening moves. Some of those gambits, just two years ago, might have seemed ill-conceived to experts. But now pro players are copying certain of these unfamiliar tactics in tournaments, even if no one fully understands how certain of these tactics lead to victory. For example, people have noticed that some versions of AlphaGo seem to like playing what’s called a three-three invasion on a star point, and they’re experimenting with that move in tournaments now too. No one’s seeing these experiments lead to clearly consistent victories yet, maybe because human players don’t understand how best to follow through.

Some moves AlphaGo likes to make against its clone are downright incomprehensible, even to the world’s best players. (These tend to happen early on in the games—probably because that phase is already mysterious, being farthest away from any final game outcome.) One opening move in Game One has many players stumped. Says Redmond, “I think a natural reaction (and the reaction I’m mostly seeing) is that they just sort of give up, and sort of throw their hands up in the opening. Because it’s so hard to try to attach a story about what AlphaGo is doing. You have to be ready to deny a lot of the things that we’ve believed and that have worked for us.”

Like others, Redmond notes that the games somehow feel “alien.” “There’s some inhuman element in the way AlphaGo plays,” he says, “which makes it very difficult for us to just even sort of get into the game.”

Still, Redmond thinks there are moments when AlphaGo (at least its older version) might not necessarily be enigmatically, transcendently good. Moments when it might possibly be making mistakes, even. There are patterns of play called joseki—series of locally confined attacks and responses, in which players essentially battle to a standstill until it only makes sense for them to move to another part of the board. Some of these joseki have been analyzed and memorized and honed over generations. Redmond suspects that people may still be better at responding in a few of these patterns, because people have analyzed them so intensely. (It’s hard to tell though, because in the AlphaGo-versus-AlphaGo games, both “copies” of the program seem to avoid getting into these joseki in the first place.)