AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol in Seoul
DeepMind's AlphaGo won four of five games against Lee Sedol in Seoul between 9 and 15 March 2016; Lee won the fourth game. Go had been the standing example of a game where search alone could not substitute for judgement, and the expectation before the match was that a decade or more remained. The result matters to this Journey for a narrower reason than the one usually given: it demonstrated capability in a closed, fully observable domain with an unambiguous scoring rule and unlimited synthetic training data. Every one of those properties is absent from the domains where the consequential claims are now made, so the match is evidence about what learned search can do and almost no evidence about anything outside a board.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Google DeepMind · company · United Kingdom · not located
- Deep learning · technology · not located
- Demis Hassabis · person · United Kingdom · not located
Evidence
Verified — Every field is supported by a cited authoritative source.
Contemporary reporting of the AlphaGo–Lee Sedol match, Seoul, March 2016
AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol four games to one in a five-game match played in Seoul between 9 and 15 March 2016, Lee winning the fourth game. V55 verification basis: search results carried the dates, the venue and the 4–1 result with attribution to contemporary reporting and to DeepMind's own announcement of the match. The underlying Nature paper on AlphaGo was NOT retrieved and is deliberately not cited here; the widely repeated 280-million-viewer figure is likewise not asserted, having reached this record only through secondary commentary.
Google DeepMind blog; People's Daily Online; China Daily; phys.org · 2016-03 · Verified
blog.google, "AlphaGo's ultimate challenge: a five-game match against the legendary Lee Sedol"; People's Daily Online and China Daily reports of 15 March 2016; phys.org, "Google computer wins final game against S. Korean Go master"
Recorded on Google DeepMind
- A deep convolutional network wins the ImageNet challenge
- AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol in Seoul
- AlphaFold2 is assessed blind at CASP14
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Related
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