SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – Google’s Go-playing software has again defeated a human champion to sweep the best-of-five series and establish its superiority in an ancient Chinese game long thought to be the realm of humans.
South Korea’s Lee Sedol, one of the world’s best Go players, was defeated for the third straight time Saturday by AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence machine, after another close match in Seoul.
The highly anticipated showdown between human and machine crushed the pride of Go fans, many of them in Asia, who believed Go would be too complex for machines to master. Some thought it would take at least another decade for computers to beat human Go champions.
Many top Go professionals commented that AlphaGo displayed unorthodox, questionable moves that initially befuddled humans but made sense in hindsight.