SEOUL, March 13 (Xinhua) – South Korea’s Lee Sedol finally broke the myth of AlphaGo, the computer created by DeepMind, after losing three consecutive matches, rallying to win himself and humanity some dignity to beat the Google Artificial Intelligence (AI) program in Game 4 of five-game human vs. machine Go-chess showdown on Sunday.
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In the battle of man versus machine, humans scored an increasingly rare victory when Go Grandmaster Lee Sedol won a consolation round against Google’s AlphaGo computer program. “I believe that there’s more a human could do to play against artificial intelligence – that’s why I feel a little bit [regretful]”.
But Go, an ancient Chinese board game where two players place black or white playing pieces, called stones, to secure more territory, has more variables than chess and was considered hard to teach computers, until now.
“AlphaGo stunned us with its tremendous performance and it certainly has a pro-level playing skill”, said Seo, who still took comfort from Lee’s sole victory.
“Thank you Lee Sedol for making us happy during the last few days”, said a South Korean news presenter as the last match came to an end.
Lee said that when he made an unexpected move, AlphaGo responded with a move as if the program had a bug, indicating that the machine lacked the ability to deal with surprises.
Experts estimated that artificial intelligence would need 10 years to beat humans at one of the most elaborate games that regular computers can’t consistently win when playing against real people. I couldn’t foresee that AlphaGo would play in such a ideal manner.
Earlier, AlphaGo was awarded the rank of honorary nine dan by the South Korean Go Association – the highest ranking there is and the first time anyone has been given an honorary professional ranking.
The article, co-authored by programmer Aja Huang (黃士傑) of Taiwan and David Silver, who both work at DeepMind, noted that AlphaGo recently also beat three-time European Go champion Fan Hui five times out of five under tournament conditions. “Basically it’s not human, never shaken psychologically and can concentrate endlessly”.
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Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, mentioned that AlphaGo won the match even though it made a “big mistake” initially. The number of possible positions in the game are more than, as they say, the number of atoms in the universe. It’s like watching my family, Lee said. I have questioned at some points in my life whether I truly enjoy the game of Go, but I admit that I enjoyed all five games against AlphaGo.
