#HTE
Google’s A.I. Software Beats World Champion Lee Sedol in First Game of Historic Go Match
In a victory that will join Deep Blue’s win over Garry Kasparov and Watson’s dominance of Brad Rutter and our friend Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!, a machine-learning algorithm created by Google has defeated legendary world champion Lee Sedol in a game of Go.
AlphaGo, a software program built by Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence division, took the first game of the historic five-game match early Wednesday morning when Lee resigned after about three and a half hours.
“I was very surprised,” Lee said after the game, according to The Verge’s Sam Byford, who is in Seoul to cover the match. “I didn’t expect to lose. [But] I didn’t think AlphaGo would play the game in such a perfect manner.” Here’s how the final board looked:
Lee added that he made some mistakes early on and believes he has a chance of winning the next game if he can improve his opening strategy. Observers, including DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, agreed the match was competitive.
But he couldn’t hide his ecstasy at the result:
Lee will have his first shot at redemption in the match’s second game, which starts Thursday local time, Wednesday night Eastern Time. DeepMind is streaming the games live on YouTube, and you can watch them here.
Obviously this isn’t the first time a computer has beaten a human champion at a game of skill. But it’s a landmark in the history of artificial intelligence because Go is among the world’s most complex games: The number of possible board configurations is greater than that of chess by many orders of magnitude. It was less than two years ago that Wired ran a story predicting that it would be a decade or more before a computer could beat a human champion.
In fact, AlphaGo accomplished that feat in November, when it swept the European champion 5-0. Beating Lee, however, represents a much tougher test: He’s recognized as the greatest Go player of his generation, and one of the best ever.
As impressive as AlphaGo’s fist-game victory is, however, it doesn’t mean that AI is anywhere close to matching humans in general intelligence. As I explained in January, Go is a constrained environment with perfectly defined rules and goals. Brilliant as AlphaGo is in that context, it’s a specialized tool designed to win a specific game. What remains unique about the human brain is not its ability to specialize, but its versatility.
That said, the approach embodied by AlphaGo—known as deep neural nets—holds enormous promise in realms ranging from image recognition to self-driving cars. And I wouldn’t bet against it in games two through five of its match with Lee. Neither would Kasparov:
Previously in Slate:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/03/09/google_deepmind_s_alphago_ai_beats_champion_lee_sedol_in_go.html