Defeated by A.I., a Legend within the Board Recreation Go Warns: Get Prepared for What’s Subsequent – The New York Occasions

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Lee Saedol was one of many world’s prime Go gamers, and his stunning loss to an A.I. opponent was a harbinger of a brand new, unsettling period. “It will not be a cheerful ending,” he says.
By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Jin Yu Young
Reporting from Seoul
Lee Saedol was the best Go participant of his era when he suffered a decisive loss, defeated not by a human opponent however by synthetic intelligence.
Mr. Lee was crushed by AlphaGo, an A.I. pc program developed by Google’s DeepMind unit. The beautiful upset, in 2016, made headlines around the world and appeared like a transparent signal that synthetic intelligence was coming into a brand new, profoundly unsettling period.
By besting Mr. Lee, an 18-time world champion revered for his intuitive and artistic model of play, AlphaGo had solved one among pc science’s best challenges: instructing itself the summary technique wanted to win at Go, extensively thought of the world’s most advanced board recreation.
“I’m very stunned as a result of I’ve by no means thought I might lose,” Mr. Lee stated on the time in a post-match information convention. “I didn’t know that AlphaGo would play such an ideal Go.”
However the implications of his loss went far past the sport itself, during which two gamers compete for territory by putting black and white stones on a gridded board made up of 19 strains by 19 strains. AlphaGo’s victory demonstrated the unbridled potential of A.I. to realize superhuman mastery of expertise as soon as thought of too difficult for machines.
Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, satisfied that people might now not compete with computer systems at Go. Synthetic intelligence, he stated, had modified the very nature of a recreation that originated in China greater than 2,500 years in the past.
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