You might have read by now that AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence, has been competing against the world champion of the board game Go in a five-game series. AlphaGo patched up its victory against world champion Lee Sedol by winning the first three matches straight but Sedol fired back to win the fourth game. Unfortunately, the man didn’t trump the machine in the final game of their contest.
AlphaGo has beaten the world champion of Go 4-1 though the victories didn’t come easy for the machine. All of the games were very close and the final one was no exception. Both sides fought hard and went deep into overtime with AlphaGo ultimately clinching the victory.
Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, mentioned that AlphaGo won the match even though it made a “big mistake” initially. When you’re playing against one of the best players of any game even the smallest of mistakes can cost you the game but AlphaGo clawed its way back to secure the “mind-blowing” victory, as Hassabis described it.
In the post-game conference, Sedol expressed how difficult the entire experience had been from a psychological perspective and also mentioned that he felt sad that the competition against this artificial intelligence was coming to an end.
Google put up a $1 million cash prize for this contest and Sedol had a fair chance of walking away with it. Since a machine won the prize Google is now going to donate the amount to charity.
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