Go Grandmaster Lee Se-Dol was applauded by the crowd after he defeated Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence system at the Chinese strategy board game. Although he had already lost the five-match series, with the DeepMind Go program AlphaGo winning the first three matches, Lee’s victory is more than just a consolation, beating an AI that he described after the second match as “near-perfect”.
Lee Sedol wins game 4!!! Congratulations! He was too good for us today and pressured #AlphaGo into a mistake that it couldn’t recover from
— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) March 13, 2016
According to Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, AlphaGo made a fatal mistake on move 79, which it only realised on move 87. By that point, however, it was too late, and Lee took advantage.
Mistake was on move 79, but #AlphaGo only came to that realisation on around move 87
— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) March 13, 2016
Hassibis went on to explain that AlphaGo uses an adaptive algorithm, allowing it to revise its strategy in real-time. That system, however, got AlphaGo into a bit of a muddle. “For us this loss is very valuable. We’re not sure what happened yet,” Hassabis said, according to The Verge.
After receiving a rapturous applause in the post-match press conference after the game, Lee remarked that “I’ve never been congratulated so much just because I won one game!” He added that, following his prediction before the series began that he would win 5-0, or 4-1 at worst, this win did mean a lot to him.
