Almost 20 years after IBM computer Deep Blue first beat reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, a new generation of machine intelligence – Google’s AlphaGo – has bested professional Go player Lee Sedol in the first game of a planned five-round match.
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Some top Go players said that AlphaGo made unorthodox moves that seemed questionable at first but then proved to make sense.
The fifth and final match is scheduled for Tuesday.
“AlphaGo controlled the momentum over more than four hours of gameplay, with Lee struggling to maintain territory against the program’s creative approach”.
Demis Hassabis, the head of AlphaGo developer Google DeepMind, has described Go as the Mount Everest for AI scientists. “It finds the black stones more challenging than the white stones”.
The artificial intelligence program, which won the first three games, still wins the match.
In the first game of the series, AlphaGo triumphed by a very narrow margin – Mr Lee had led for most of the match, but AlphaGo managed to build up a strong lead in its closing stages.
After making 176 moves, AlphaGo won by resignation and had 8:31 left on the clock. AlphaGo rather uses machine learning methods to work out how to enhance its playing style, actually playing games of Go again and again until it got to a state where it can play intensely against world class players.
“If today I was, let’s say, winning three consecutive games and if I had lost one single game it would have really hurt tremendously”.
Machine has triumphed over man in the complicated board game Go.
Experts did not expect an artificial intelligence program to beat a human professional for at least a decade, until AlphaGo beat a European champion player previous year.
The champion himself admitted defeat and said he would mostly enjoy playing the remaining games now that there was no pressure for him to win.
Lee Sedol finally had something to laugh about.
The rules are simpler than those of chess, but a player typically has a choice of 200 moves, compared with about 20 in chess – there are more possible positions in Go than atoms in the universe, according to DeepMind’s team.
Lee, the South-Korean professional Go player, expressed his sentiments in a post-match press conference.
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“People who are involved with intellectual capital will be the winners of the future”, Kaku said. 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.
