DeepMind’s program AlphaGo takes on the legendary Lee Sedol (9-dan pro), the top Go player of the past decade, in a $1M 5-game challenge match in Seoul. This is the livestream for Match 2.
AlphaGo has just won the second game of a five-game Go match being held in Seoul, South Korea. AlphaGo prevailed in a gripping battle that saw Lee resign after hanging on in the final period of byo-yomi (“second-reading” in Japanese) overtime, which gave him fewer than 60 seconds to carry out each move.
AlphaGo is now up 2-0 in the best of 5 set of matches.
Lee Sedol said at the post-game press conference, ‘I would like to express my respect to Demis and his team for making such an amazing program like AlphaGo. I am surprised by this result. But I did enjoy the game and am looking forward to the next one.’
Yesterday I was surprised but today it’s more than that — I am speechless,” said Lee in the post-game press conference. “I admit that it was a very clear loss on my part. From the very beginning of the game I did not feel like there was a point that I was leading.” DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis was “speechless” too. “I think it’s testament to Lee Se-dol’s incredible skills,” he said. “We’re very pleased that AlphaGo played some quite surprising and beautiful moves, according to the commentators, which was amazing to see.”
In the first game, Lee felt he made one error and he was never able to recover from it.
Lee is an 18-time world champion. Lee is 33 years old. He was promoted to the professional level in 1995 when he was 12.
AlphaGo has been hailed as a landmark development in artificial intelligence research, as Go has previously been regarded as a hard problem in machine learning that was expected to be out of reach for the technology of the time. Toby Manning, the referee of AlphaGo’s match against Fan Hui, and Hajin Lee, secretary general of the International Go Federation, both reason that in the future, Go players will get help from computers to learn what they have done wrong in games and improve their skills
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