A software program is about to take on one of the best living players of Go, an ancient Chinese board game.
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The five-day match is about showing “how flexible and powerful learning algorithms can be”, he said.
The victor of the series will win a $1 million (£700,000) prize-but if DeepMind wins, it will donate the proceeds to charity.
The game, which kicks off on Wednesday, will run five rounds through March 15.
In the case of Go, Google developers realised a more “human-like” approach would win over brute computing power.
After watching Google’s presentation of how AlphaGo works, Lee said he thought a machine might be able to imitate human intuition, even though the intuition may not be as sharp as a person’s.
World champion Lee last month engaged in the Go version of trash talking. Over time, it sees where it goes wrong and starts to learn how humans play the game.
“Having learned today how its algorithms narrow down possible choices, I have a feeling that AlphaGo can imitate human intuition to a certain degree”, Lee told reporters.
Go is a board game widely played for centuries in East Asia.
Describing its strategy as excellent, Sedol said: “I was very surprised because I did not think that I would lose the game”. The object is to have larger territories than the opponent by surrounding vacant areas of the board using their stones. In chess, there’s an average of 20 possible moves after the first turn; in Go there’s an average of more than 361, so it isn’t as easy to predict.
The match-up sparked enough interest to warrant an Internet live-stream as well as live TV broadcasts in South Korea, China and Japan.
The total number of moves in the game was 186, with AlphaGo taking 23 minutes more to complete its moves than Sedol.
Lee resigned after about three and a half hours, with 28 minutes and 28 seconds remaining on his clock.
“I think the advantage of AlphaGo is that it will never get exhausted and it will not get intimidated either”, Hassabis said.
Although the computer had whitewashed European champion Fan Hui 5-0 last October, it had been expected to struggle against 33-year-old Lee, who has topped the world rankings for most of the past decade. “The system needs several thousand games [to improve]”, he said.
DeepMind calls its process “deep reinforcement learning”, and it’s something that could be used in developing other artificial intelligence programs.
As it went, it reprogrammed itself and improved.
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Hassabis emphasized that Google wants to apply the technology to more than just playing a game, using the AI to help real-world problems in healthcare systems, robotics, household robots and smarter home management systems. “Artificial intelligence will win (humans) sometime in the future”, said Lee. With Go widely considered a final frontier for dominance by the human intellect, an AI victory will surely spark more than a few dire headlines about silicon’s inevitable rise.
