Google’s Go-playing computer has scored a second victory against its human component, putting it just one win away from victory.
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Lee, as a Korean, and a victor of 18 world Go championships, may be immune to such thinking – but if he loses the next game in the best-of-five series, he loses out on the $1 million prize, and that’s bound to hurt.
Computers eventually will defeat human players of Go, but the beauty of the ancient Chinese game of strategy that has fascinated people for thousands of years will remain, the Go world champion said Tuesday.
Go champion Lee Sedol said he was left “speechless” after his second straight loss to the machine in a highly anticipated human versus machine face-off.
South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol appears on the screen during the second match of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google’s artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo at the media room in Seoul, South Korea.
Yesterday, the AlphaGo program beat South Korea’s 9-dan Go player Lee Sedol in a live-streamed Go match. And so far, AlphaGo has won both games – meaning that if Sedol is going to triumph, he has to stage a quick comeback.
“When machine learning is utilized, the performance of Google’s existing products and services can be improved and challenges in a great variety of fields become possible, and we will rack our brains to make good use of machine learning in the fields including healthcare and robotics so that it can contribute to improving the quality of people’s lives”, Dean added. The 33-year-old initially was confident of a sweeping victory two weeks ago, but sounded less optimistic a day before the match. “Today I really feel that AlphaGo played a near-perfect game”.
Google’s team compared AlphaGo’s win to landing on the moon.
Taking the 4-4 point on the board, also called the “star point”, is considered to be the standard opening move in modern Go games.
During the match, the commentators noted that some of AlphaGo’s moves seemed peculiar, but they ultimately proved decisive in the result of the match.
Lee Sedol has overcome some formidable players over his professional Go career, but now he has been taken down a peg by a new type of opponent. “There was not a moment where I thought AlphaGo’s moves were unreasonable”.
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Go is supposed to be more complex than chess. There is US$1 million in prize money at stake, though if AlphaGo does win this will be donated to charity.
