” The Google program, known as Alpha Go, actually learned the game without much human help. “It is also a mirror on life”, Fan Hui, Go champion in Europe, told the journal Nature after losing to AlphaGo in October.
Advertisement
What’s the game of Go?
South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol, an 18-time global title victor, conceded defeat in a match broadcast live, with one Youtube stream watched by tens of thousands of people worldwide, and domestic cable gave frequent updates.
AlphaGo’s victory in the ancient Chinese board game is a breakthrough for artificial intelligence, showing the program developed by Google DeepMind has mastered one of the most creative and complex games ever devised.
“I was very surprised because I did not think that I would lose the game”.
Lee said AlphaGo’s early strategy was “excellent” and that he was stunned by one unconventional move it made that a human never would have played. AlphaGo did it by studying millions of games, just as Google’s algorithms learn to identify photos by looking at millions of similar ones.
The South Korean must now win three games in a row against Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo to triumph in the best-of-five series.
“We are very, very excited by this historic moment and very, very pleased with how AlphaGo performed”, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of AlphaGo developer DeepMind, said after the victory.
The games will be even (no handicap), with 1 million Dollars (3.4 Billion UGX) in prize money for the victor. But it may have come back to hurt him, as Lee ran into trouble with the clock toward the end of the game, and commentators suggested that he didn’t have time to read all the moves on the part of the board where he was laying his pieces.
This time the game went to overtime, but Lee was eventually forced to resign. The 33-year-old initially was confident of a sweeping victory two weeks ago, but sounded less optimistic a day before the match.
“When machine learning is utilized, the performance of Google’s existing products and services can be improved and challenges in a great variety of fields become possible, and we will rack our brains to make good use of machine learning in the fields including healthcare and robotics so that it can contribute to improving the quality of people’s lives”, Dean added.
This story was corrected to say the first game was on Wednesday.
Advertisement
Lee Sedol has overcome some formidable players over his professional Go career, but now he has been taken down a peg by a new type of opponent.
