AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol
| Seoul, South Korea, 9–15 March 2016 | |
|---|---|
| Game one | AlphaGo won. |
| Game two | AlphaGo won. |
| Game three | AlphaGo won. |
| Game four | Lee Sedol won. |
| Game five | AlphaGo won. |
 Machine trains self to beat humans at world's hardest game, Retro Report, 2:51, Retro Report
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AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol, or Google DeepMind Challenge Match, was a five-game Go match between 18-time world champion Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, a computer Go program developed by Google DeepMind, played in Seoul, South Korea between 9 and 15 March 2016. AlphaGo won all but the fourth game; all games were won by resignation. The match has been compared with the historic chess match between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov in 1997.
The winner of the match was slated to win $1 million. Since AlphaGo won, Google DeepMind stated that the prize will be donated to charities, including UNICEF, and Go organisations. Lee received $170,000 ($150,000 for participating in the five games and an additional $20,000 for winning one game).
After the match, The Korea Baduk Association awarded AlphaGo the highest Go grandmaster rank – an "honorary 9 dan". It was given in recognition of AlphaGo's "sincere efforts" to master Go. This match was chosen by Science as one of the Breakthrough of the Year runners-up on 22 December 2016.
Go is a complex board game that requires intuition, creative and strategic thinking. It has long been considered a difficult challenge in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and is considerably more difficult to solve than chess. Many in the field of artificial intelligence consider Go to require more elements that mimic human thought than chess. Mathematician I. J. Good wrote in 1965:
Go on a computer? – In order to programme a computer to play a reasonable game of Go, rather than merely a legal game – it is necessary to formalise the principles of good strategy, or to design a learning programme. The principles are more qualitative and mysterious than in chess, and depend more on judgment. So I think it will be even more difficult to programme a computer to play a reasonable game of Go than of chess.
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