AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol: Google's AlphaGo Takes Over The World in Go Challenge Series Against Top Human Go Player
The ancient Chinese board game called Weiqi, also known as Go, appeared to have simulated a cataclysmic and futuristic battle between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) when Alpha Go, a self-learning software created by Google's AI research program DeepMind defeated one of the world's legendary Go players, the South Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol.
Last week, Alpha Go dominated Lee Sedol in the best-of-five games streamed live on Deepmind's YouTube channel. Unlike western chess, Go has been extremely challenging for many AI research experts. The game requires enormous amount of intuition and calculation- a truly painstaking game that even a computer program finds it hard to predict its outcome. AlphaGo victory is considered a landmark in AI technological development since no AI had ever beaten top Go players until Wednesday last week.
"The winner here, no matter what happens, is humanity- humanity wins because the advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning will make each, and every other, human being in the entire world smarter, more capable - just better human beings," remarked Google's parent company Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt as mentioned in a report by CNBC.
Despite a resounding three-straight-in-a-row victory over Lee, the grandmaster still managed to carve out a special achievement for himself. As mentioned in a Wired report, Lee exposed AlphaGo's weakness and broke the AI's dominance in the fourth game proving that machines are not infallible.
Meanwhile, Facebook exec and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg congratulated Google's quantum leap in AI technology and research after AlphaGo claimed three straight victories over its human rival. Beneath the complimentary statement, however, lies a fierce competition between the two tech giants that are putting considerable amount of resources in AI research. In fact, the social network has been training a homegrown self-learning program to play Go developed under the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) group as stated in a VentureBeat report.
