Editor’s be aware: Lee Sae Dol is knowledgeable Go participant who performed a now-famous public match towards AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s AI system, again in 2016.
As a world Go champion, I’d solely ever performed the sport towards different people. That modified in 2016 once I performed a five-match recreation of Go towards AlphaGo, Google’s AI system. I admit, I underestimated simply how highly effective AI may very well be and ended up solely successful one out of our 5 video games collectively.
After I first obtained the invitation from Google to play towards AlphaGo, I didn’t fairly grasp how severe of a matter it was. I assumed it will be a straightforward victory, and that this was an off-the-cuff experiment. However as soon as this recreation turned public, I spotted how huge of a deal it was.
And I nonetheless bear in mind how amazed I used to be at how brilliantly AlphaGo performed, the strikes it got here up with. Go is a deeply complicated strategic recreation — famously much more difficult than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 attainable board configurations. Meaning AlphaGo needs to be artistic, not simply calculative.
Later, I discovered that scientists had predicted AI wouldn’t attain that sort of functionality for one more decade. And this 12 months marks the eight-year anniversary of the sport I performed towards AlphaGo. In these eight years, AI has developed at an unimaginable velocity. Go gamers all over the world have now used AlphaGo to attempt to uncover new strikes, new methods and new concepts on this historical recreation.