If you’ve not been following tech news recently, you might not have heard about a rather interesting five-game series taking place between Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence called AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, the world champion of Go.
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In a match broadcast on YouTube, AlphaGo won the third and decisive game against the world’s second top ranked Go player, Lee Sedol, in South Korea on Saturday.
Many top Go professionals commented after AlphaGo’s initial wins that it displayed unorthodox, questionable moves that initially befuddled humans, but made sense in hindsight.
The loss stymies the AI system’s prospects of equaling a 5-0 win against an European Go champion in October.
After winning the competition, Sergey Brin, Co-founder, Google said, “Honoured to be in company of Lee Sedol”.
Since Wednesday, Lee and AlphaGo have been engaged in these high stakes games in Seoul. It also looked like Lee Se-dol would lose each of the five of his games too yet figured out how to turn AlphaGo’s triumphant streak on its head by causing the A.I.to make a fault that it couldn’t recover from.
This won’t be the end of the tournament – there’s still one game left to play on Tuesday.
“00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible positions [in the game of Go] – that’s more than the number of atoms in the universe, and more than a googol times larger than chess”. “But… because I lost three matches and I was able to get one single win, I think this one win is so valuable I would not exchange this with anything in the world”, he said.
“The ancient Chinese game of Go is one of the last games where the best human players can still beat the best artificial intelligence players”. “So I am very excited that we have been able to instill that kind of beauty in our computers”.
“Go is the most profound game that mankind has ever devised”, Hassabis said, before the games against Lee started. American commentator Michael Redmond (9-dan) said: “Today’s game was another example of AlphaGo playing a very interesting, good game”.
Congrats to the Google DeepMind team on this historic milestone in AI research – a third straight victory over Go grandmaster Lee Sedol.
AlphaGo never recovered, and ultimately resigned the game.
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While AlphaGo succeeded at a more complex game than did Deep Blue, it’s still physically limited, just as even IBM’s advanced cognitive computer (and Jeopardy winner) Watson is, Olson said.
