23996 - Alpha Go – Lee Se-dol 1-0

N. Lygeros

There is no need to imagine a computer beating the world champion of the game Go. It’s now a reality. Even if throughout most of the game 1, the world champion had seemed to have the upper hand, in the last part, Alpha Go took an incredible lead. Sure, Lee Se-dol mentioned that he made a mistake at the very beginning, but the problem still remains. He characterized Alpha Go’s strategy as excellent and said that he was stunned one unconventional move it had made that a human never would have played. He thought before the match he would win all the five games but the reality is already different with the mortal. So we have a new result, after chess, for artificial intelligence. Because even if the match is not finished, the victory of Alpha Go is already a point. In this field, go game is difficult in the sense that there is no easy way to compute all the scenarios that’s why a formal intuition is needed to develop a robust strategy. Alpha Go studied common patterns in the past games, then it got reasonable standards by looking at professional games. And finally with its neural networks, it played many games with itself with different versions to be slightly better each time. In fact it learned from its mistakes. And the result is the victory at the first game with the world champion Lee Se-dol. In reality, it’s of course only a starting point in this field, but it was not only a try but a master’s move.