Artificial intelligence software has been taken to the next level after Google’s Deepmind AI software won a best out of five Go match against Lee Sedol, the greatest Go player in the world, by beating him in the first three games. The 39-year-old emphasized that AlphaGo wasn’t specifically trained to face Lee and the way that its AI gets stronger is by playing more games against an “incredible player” like Lee.
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AlphaGo’s creators had described Go as the “Mt Everest” of AI, citing the complexity of the game, which requires a degree of creativity and intuition to prevail over an opponent.
Despite losing the series, Lee is scheduled to play twice more against AlphaGo, today and on Tuesday.
The final two matches are scheduled on March 13 and 15 and will be held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea.
Lee struggled in the early phase of the fourth match but gained a lead towards the end, eventually prompting AlphaGo to resign. 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.
However, a Go board has 361 positions on which players place stones, wider than those of chess and shogi.
Lee, on the other hand, has used up all of his allotted match time including two periods of “byo-yomi” overtime.
After making 176 moves, AlphaGo won by resignation and had 8:31 left on the clock.
A supercomputer programmed by Google just beat a human at a really complicated game. “Mistake was on move 79, but #AlphaGo only came to that realization on around 87”.
“Lee is not in AlphaGo’s match, but he cannot represent humanity and he’s not the right person to take the challenge”, said Ke on Sunday. “We’re not sure what happened yet”, Hassabis said, as quoted by the Verge. AlphaGo often made moves that human watchers considered inappropriate but eventually proved to be effective.
Suddenly, the match was turning in Lee’s favor. It seems, though, that Facebook’s attempt at a computer Go player is still a few miles away from Google’s.
“I do have stress because the result wasn’t good, but since I enjoyed playing these games, it wasn’t that painful”, he said.
AlphaGo eventually determined that it didn’t have a substantial chance of winning – and resigned after 180 moves.
Go, known as “baduk” in Korea, originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.
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The game is played on a grid with black and white pieces, called stones, and the players score points for taking territory with their stones and capturing stones from the other player.
