The five-game challenge will be livestreamed on YouTube between March 9 and 15, according to DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis.
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A date has been set for a match between South Korean go player Lee Se-dol and AlphaGo, a go-playing computer program developed by Google.
Google said last month its program won 99.8 percent of games against other programs created to play Go – giving it a almost flawless record.
The match between Sedol and AlphaGo will have many similarities to the famous 1996 chess match between chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer.
More importantly, though, it marked the first real evidence of the power of artificial intelligence.
Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepMind is going to pitch its AI system against Lee Sedol, the best Go player in the world.
Thrilled to officially announce the 5-game challenge match between #AlphaGo and Lee Sedol in Seoul from March 9th-15th for a $1M prize! Players take turns placing back or white stones on a grid, capturing opponents’ stones or surrounding spaces to take territory.
The news was announced in a tweet by Demis Hassabis, head of Google’s DeepMind lab. Rather, programmers “taught” it the strategies used by Go masters, then had it play numerous virtual games to reinforce them.
The London startup, which was acquired by Google for £400 million in 2014, was in a race with Facebook to develop an AI that could defeat a professional Go player. That being said, Kasparov did go on to win three, while drawing two of the five games that followed that loss.
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“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”, Sedol said in a statement, published by VentureBeat. That’s more than the number of atoms in the known universe, and many orders of magnitude more than the number of possible chess positions. He’s regarded as one of the best Go players in the world.
