The historic victory, of the machine over the legendary player, reignites as much excitement over the future of artificial intelligence as it does concern for a Frankenstein-like world, where machines are programmed so perfectly that one day, they surpass human intellect. In its five matches against European champion Fan Hui last October, which AlphaGo won 5-0, and Wednesday’s match against Lee, the human-like algorithm always occupied 4-4 points in its first two moves. 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.
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In a past interview, Lee Sedol said “I have heard that Google DeepMind’s AI is surprisingly strong and getting stronger, but I am confident that I can win at least this time.” .
After suffering his second straight defeat against Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo, South Korean Go player Lee Se-dol said Thursday he accepts his “complete defeat” and is “speechless” about the self-learning machine’s playing level.
Go champion Lee Sedol, at right, studies the game board during a match against the AlphaGo AI program.
The remaining games run through March 15.
IBM made headlines when its AI computer Deep Blue defeated chest grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, but chess only has around 10 to the power of 60 possible ways a game can be played, compared to 10 to the power of 700 possible scenarios in Go. Players’ moves reflect their personalities and distinctive styles, and the life-and-death battles between black and white stones for territory on the 19 by 19 square grid are often used to illustrate important life lessons. The networks have millions of neuron-like connections that AlphaGo can rearrange as it plays. Lee Se-dol made unexpected moves from the beginning of the match to get the inside track and AlphaGo kept its pace in a calm way.
Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, even those who do not play the popular board game, followed the games on live TV and on YouTube.
The 33-year-old ninth-dan Lee declared his resignation around four hours and 30 minutes into the match. “We are very pleased about how AlphaGo performed”, Hassabis said.
Of 55 scientists, 69 percent believed the program would win, and 31 percent believed Lee would be victorious.
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“It did not play like a human at all”, Kim Sung-ryong, another Go expert, said of the computer’s lack of emotion despite making some potentially fatal mistakes.
