Defeated by A.I., a Legend within the Board Sport 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 surprising 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 technology 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. laptop program developed by Google’s DeepMind unit. The gorgeous upset, in 2016, made headlines around the world and appeared like a transparent signal that synthetic intelligence was getting into a brand new, profoundly unsettling period.
By besting Mr. Lee, an 18-time world champion revered for his intuitive and artistic fashion of play, AlphaGo had solved one in all laptop science’s biggest challenges: instructing itself the summary technique wanted to win at Go, extensively thought of the world’s most complicated board sport.
“I’m very shocked as a result of I’ve by no means thought I’d 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, through 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 abilities as soon as thought of too difficult for machines.
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