It is, after all, more than 20 years since a computer beat us at draughts and 19 since IBM’s finest beat Garry Kasparov in a game of chess.
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Last January, Google announced it had created AlphaGo, a form of AI which it believed would be the best in the world at the board game Go, often considered the most challenging game to create a program for.
The progression of AI is marked by victories against top players in many strategy games. Previously, AlphaGo beat European Go champion Fan Hui in October.
In recent years, scientists have made strides in getting computers to think and learn in ways more similar to people, with the eventual goal that AI will one day assist humans in advanced fields, such as healthcare and scientific research.
In the first of a five match series held in Seoul, Korea, today, AlphaGo gained an early advantage after forcing Lee to concede the game with less than 29 minutes left on the clock.
“I was very surprised”, said Lee after the match. Not quite. There are still four games to go; tomorrow (10 March) we may see a different kind of match, as AlphaGo will play first, with the black stones, rather than second, with the white ones.
When Lee first accepted the AI challenge, he had confidently predicted a clear-cut win, saying that AlphaGo’s performance against Fan had been nowhere near good enough to defeat him.
For me, the key moment came when I saw Hassabis passing his iPhone to other Google executives in our VIP room, some three hours into the game. This group is open to IT Leaders, MIS & IT Managers, Network & Infrastructure Managers who share insights, discuss challenges & wins and keep abreast of cutting edge technologies.
Bloomberg Business reported that the AlphaGo software was developed by Google’s London-based AI subsidiary DeepMind, whose co-founder Demis Hassabis described its main advantages: “It’ll never get exhausted and it’ll never get intimidated”. Team lead David Silver said it was an “amazing game of Go that really pushed AlphaGo to its limits”.
Google’s DeepMind AI division just defeated human champion Lee Sedol in a game of Go.
Wednesday’s match was the first of five planned between man and machine.
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“Go is a profoundly complex game, which is why this has always been regarded as the outstanding grand challenge for artificial intelligence”, Hassabis noted in a blog post yesterday.
