Editor’s word: Lee Sae Dol is an expert Go participant who performed a now-famous public match in opposition to AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s AI system, again in 2016.
As a world Go champion, I’d solely ever performed the sport in opposition to different people. That modified in 2016 once I performed a five-match sport of Go in opposition to AlphaGo, Google’s AI system. I admit, I underestimated simply how highly effective AI might be and ended up solely profitable one out of our 5 video games collectively.
Once I first received the invitation from Google to play against AlphaGo, I didn’t fairly grasp how critical of a matter it was. I assumed it will be a simple victory, and that this was an informal experiment. However as soon as this sport turned public, I noticed how massive 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 advanced strategic sport — 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. Which means AlphaGo needs to be inventive, not simply calculative.
Later, I discovered that scientists had predicted AI wouldn’t attain that type of functionality for an additional decade. And this yr marks the eight-year anniversary of the sport I performed in opposition to AlphaGo. In these eight years, AI has developed at an unbelievable pace. Go gamers world wide have now used AlphaGo to attempt to uncover new strikes, new methods and new concepts on this historic sport.