So when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the world was astonished.
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“It’s playing moves that are definitely not usual moves”, said Michael Redmond, the game commentator and also a highly ranked Go player, speculating it was “coming up with the moves on its own”.
Update: AlphaGo today beat Lee Sedol in their third match, which means Google’s AI bests the human champion 3-0. “I’m really honored to be here in the company of Lee Sedol, such an incredible player, as well as the DeepMind team who’ve been working so hard on the beauty of a computer”.
After the game, a laughing Lee Sedol said, “It’s just one win, and I’ve never been congratulated so much just because I won one game”.
In January, “AlphaGo” defeated Fan Hui – the European champion of the game that was developed in China 2,500 years ago. If indeed AlphaGo comes out as the victor of the 5 game tournament it would be a watershed moment for artificial intelligence.
“AlphaGo played consistently from beginning to the end while Lee, as he is only human, showed some mental vulnerability”, one of Lee’s former coaches, Kwon Kap-Yong, told the AFP news agency.
The million dollar winning purse will now be donated to Unicef and STEM while Lee is still paid $150,000 for playing all five games.
“Sooner or later, the computer will defeat all human Go players”.
“Lee Sedol is the one who lost today, not humanity”, Lee said.
The game involves players taking turns to place black or white stones on a board, trying to capture the opponent’s stones or surround empty space to make points of territory.
Instead, they said, AlphaGo has sought to approximate human intuition, by studying old matches and using simulated games to hone itself independently.
Machine has triumphed over man in the complicated board game Go. Humans have limited memory and need brilliant pattern perception and creative strategies to win. In Go there are many positions the board can be in.
Humans will still ultimately win the war against computers, because of things Kaku, and other futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, say can’t be computed – love, leadership skills, innovation and common sense. This is game four of a five-game series, and DeepMind won the previous three games.
Lee said that when he made an unexpected move, AlphaGo responded with a move as if the program had a bug, indicating that the machine lacked the ability to deal with surprises.
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“People who are involved with intellectual capital will be the winners of the future”, Kaku said.
