A computer dubbed AlphaGo, created by Google-owned DeepMind, has defeated 18-time Go world champion Lee Se-dol for the third time.
Advertisement
The program scored its third victory against Lee Sedol Saturday, winning a five-match tournament. Google DeepMind’s AI system won its match against a top-ranked player of Go, as machine-learning software mastered the intricacies of the 2,500-year-old strategy board game. Each time the machine learned more and more about the patterns of play and now the AlphaGo has usurped Lee for the top spot.
“I believe (Lee) would have been hard to beat today (Saturday) by any other top professional”, said 9-dan pro player and match commentator Michael Redmond, who called AlphaGo a “work of art” that could revolutionise Go play in the future.
Chinese board game Go is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess.
For AlphaGo’s creators, Google DeepMind, victory went way beyond the $1.0 million dollar prize money, to prove that AI has far more to offer than superhuman number-crunching. What’s interesting about watching AlphaGo play is that it doesn’t think like a human, and so doesn’t play like a classically-taught Go player would. This is the livestream for Match 3 (Game 3) to be played on: 12th March 13:00 KST (local), 04:00 GMT; note for USA viewers this is the day before on: 11th March 20:00 PT, 23:00 ET. Lee, by virtue of being a champion prizefighter who has spent most of his life honing his Go skills, still received about £100,000 just for turning up.
In 1950, Claude Shannon calculated there were one quadragintillion possible games of chess – 10 or one followed by 40 zeros.
Lee Sedol sounded apologetic for his third-straight loss to AlphaGo. “As an AI researcher myself, I’m still not convinced that we’re on the cusp of a “singularity” or any major technological breakthroughs in AI, but there are still many more interesting and useful applications of AI that we will see in the coming years”, he said.
Here’s a post from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg back in January explaining the importance of Go with respect to machine learning advancements. If this is the case then you can expect Lee Se-dol to improve as he gets used to his opponent. In another landmark victory for AI IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. “I’ve never played a game where I felt this amount of pressure, and I wasn’t able to overcome this pressure”, said Sedol. AlphaGo took nearly all of its time compared to Lee Sedol who had nearly 30 minutes left on the clock.
He earlier predicted a landslide victory over artificial intelligence (AI) but was later forced to concede that AlphaGo was “too strong” .
Advertisement
After winning the competition, Sergey Brin, Co-founder, Google said, “Honoured to be in company of Lee Sedol”.
