Machine defeats man
A Google-developed computer programme won its best-of-five match-up with a South Korean Go grandmaster yesterday, taking an unassailable 3-0 lead to score a major victory for a new style of "intuitive" artificial intelligence (AI).
The programme, AlphaGo, took a little over four hours to secure its third consecutive win over Lee Se-Dol -- one of the ancient game's greatest modern players with 18 international titles to his name.
Lee, who has topped the world ranking for much of the past decade and had predicted an easy victory when accepting the AlphaGo challenge, now finds himself fighting to avoid a whitewash in the two remaining dead rubbers on Sunday and Tuesday.
"I don't know what to say, but I think I have to express my apologies first," a crestfallen Lee told a post-game press conference.
"I apologise for being unable to satisfy a lot of people's expectations. I kind of felt powerless," Lee said, acknowledging that he had "misjudged" the computer programme's abilities.
For AlphaGo's creators, Google DeepMind, victory went way beyond the $1.0 million dollar prize money, to prove that AI has far more to offer than superhuman number-crunching.
"To be honest, we are a bit stunned and speechless," said a smiling DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who stressed that Lee's defeat in Seoul should not be seen as a loss for humanity.
Previously, the most famous AI victory to date came in 1997 when the IBM-developed supercomputer Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, the then-world class chess champion, in its second attempt.
But a true mastery of Go, which has more possible move configurations than there are atoms in the universe, had long been considered the exclusive province of humans -- until now.
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.
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