Lee Sedol

These days, Google — as well as many other tech giants — is all about Artificial Intelligence. We’ve seen it shown off in many different shapes at its latest I/O conference, but perhaps one of the biggest achievements in the field was a little far from the consumer-world of Allo or the new Google assistant.

After the recent victory, in fact, it will be Google’s Deepmind team to be put again to the test at Go, this time against the world’s new number one player (via Engadget)…

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Back when I was in high school, I remember our computer studies teacher telling us that a computer only does what it’s told to do, and so mistakes are not the machine’s, but rather the user’s. With neural networks and machine learning, that is no longer true. AlphaGo, DeepMind’s specialist Go-playing machine, has proved as much. AlphaGo has been programmed to learn from its mistakes, and can err all on its own.

The AI-powered system failed to recover from an error against Lee Sedol in their fourth game, and eventually lost. In the fifth game, however, it made a mistake and was able to win the series in seemingly dramatic fashion.

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Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s CEO and founder, today announced the historic news that its machine, AlphaGo, won its third game in a row versus 18-time Go world champion, Lee Sedol. With the third win under its belt, that’s the five-game match now sealed. A machine has officially beaten the world’s best player at a game which is widely considered to be very difficult to teach a machine.

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