Editor’s notice: 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 after I performed a five-match recreation of Go towards AlphaGo, Google’s AI system. I admit, I underestimated simply how highly effective AI could possibly 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 believed it will be a straightforward victory, and that this was an off-the-cuff experiment. However as soon as this recreation turned public, I noticed how huge of a deal it was.
And I nonetheless keep in mind how amazed I used to be at how brilliantly AlphaGo performed, the strikes it got here up with. Go is a deeply advanced strategic recreation — famously way more sophisticated 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 must be inventive, not simply calculative.
Later, I realized that scientists had predicted AI wouldn’t attain that sort of functionality for an additional decade. And this yr marks the eight-year anniversary of the sport I performed towards AlphaGo. In these eight years, AI has developed at an unbelievable velocity. Go gamers around the globe have now used AlphaGo to attempt to uncover new strikes, new methods and new concepts on this historic recreation.
