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Go champion to battle Google DeepMind AlphaGo computer

The ancient board game Go long remained a human conquest – requiring too much complex strategy and intuition to be bested by a computer.

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AlphaGo will square off against the 33-year-old Lee Sedol a total of five times (9, 10, 12, 13, 15 March) at a hotel in Seoul. It is believed to have first been played in China 3000 years ago.

Lee is also optimistic that he can beat DeepMind in the next match. The chess-playing computer searched by brute force over thousands of times more positions than AlphaGo, which instead looks ahead by playing out the remainder of the game in its “imagination”, using a technique known as the Monte-Carlo tree search, according to Google DeepMind. Their rapid progress culminated in the historic victory of IBM’s Deep Blue computer over world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. I guess we feel a lot of affinity with the system we’ve built, especially because of the way it’s been built – it has learned, we’ve trained it in some sense, and it’s playing in quite a human-like style.

Google’s DeepMind AI division just defeated human champion Lee Sedol in a game of Go. The five-match tournament – which is taking place in Seoul, South Korea – will be streamed live around the world via YouTube. The rank gap between Hui and Sedol is significant, and Sedol’s had the added benefit of being able to study Hui’s games against the program. This group is open to IT Leaders, MIS & IT Managers, Network & Infrastructure Managers who share insights, discuss challenges & wins and keep abreast of cutting edge technologies.

Lee, letting out a resigned laugh, said he made mistakes early on and failed to recover. If Lee wins the series, he gets $1 million and reasserts his title as global champ; a convincing win by AlphaGo would signal another technological advance by scary smart computers.

Go reputedly has more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the Universe, and mastery of the game by a computer was thought to be at least a decade away until the victory over Mr Fan.

Echoing the AGA official, Andrew Okun, the AGA president, said that different from now “human players will try to challenge the computer grandmaster in the near future”. “AlphaGo took nearly all of its time compared to Lee Sedol who had nearly 30 minutes left on the clock”. While chess has 20 potential moves per one turn, Go has 200 options.

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Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 in efforts to beef up its portfolio in artificial intelligence and robotics. The victor will receive one-million US dollars in prize money.

South Korean Go player Lee Se-dol speaks during the post match press conference at Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul on March 9 2016 after he lost his first Go match against Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo