‪‪Artificial intelligence‬ Google‬‬'s AlphaGo has beaten Lee Sedol

A 3,000-year old Chinese board game was the focus of a very 21st century showdown as South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Se-Dol kicked off his highly anticipated clash with the Google-developed supercomputer, AlphaGo.

After an extraordinarily close contest, Google’s artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has beaten Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top players, in the first game of their historic five-game match at Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel. Known as AlphaGo, this Google creation not only proved it can compete the game’s best, but also showed off its remarkable ability to learn the game on its own.

Experts were reluctant to tip a winner between Lee, one of the greatest Go players of the modern era who has topped the world ranking for most of the past decade, and the computer, which has already crushed European champion Fan Hui in a 5-0 whitewash.

 The match which extends through next Tuesday serves as a litmus test of the progress of machine learning. Similar AI techniques have already reinvented myriad services inside Google and other Internet giants, including the Google search engine, and it’s poised to accelerate the progress of everything from scientific research to robotics.

The most famous AI victory to date came in 1997, when the IBM-developed supercomputer Deep Blue beat the then-world class chess champion Garry Kasparov. 

But experts say Go presents an entirely different challenge as the complexity of the game and incomputable number of move options mean that the computer must be capable of human-like “intuition” to prevail. 

When Lee first accepted the AI challenge, he had confidently predicted a clear-cut win, saying that AlphaGo’s performance against Fan had been nowhere near good enough to defeat him. 

But the grandmaster was less bullish at a press conference in Seoul on March 8, where he confessed to some pre-match nerves. 

“Now I think I may not beat AlphaGo by such a large margin like 5-0. It’s only right that I’m a little nervous about the match,” he said. 

Go reputedly has more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the Universe, and mastery of the game by a computer was thought to be at least a decade away until the victory over Fan. 

“At the beginning of the match, I never imagined I could lose,”in Seoul. 

AlphaGo uses two sets of “deep neural networks” containing millions of connections similar to neurons in the brain. 

It is able to predict a winner from each move, thus reducing the search base to manageable levels something co-creator David Silver has described as “more akin to imagination”. 

The match at the Four Seasons hotel in the South Korean capital promises a US$1mil (RM4.13mil) payout for the winner.