Dr Demis Hassabis is a co-winner of this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry.
Hassabis, 48, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, developed the AI model AlphaFold to predict protein structures.

Hassabis visited the Nihon Ki-In, the Japanese headquarters of the game of Go, in Tokyo in late November 2024.

Hassabis, a chess master, learned Go when he was a student in Cambridge, UK, and used that knowledge to develop AlphaGo, a Go AI that became famous for defeating top human professional Go players.

After a ceremonial match against one of Japan’s top players, Yuta Iyama 9p, at the Yugen No Ma room, Hassabis said that AlphaGo laid the groundwork for later development of the AlphaFold model. AlphaGo defeated one of the strongest professional Go players, Lee Sedol 9p, in a best-of-five match in 2016.

Mr Hassabis was awarded an amateur 9-dan diploma by the president of the Nihon Ki-In, Takemiya Yōkō, because his creation AlphaGo has contributed greatly to the development of Go in the world.