Why The Retirement Of Lee Se-Dol, Former 'Go' Champion, Is A Sign Of Things To Come

South Korean professional Go player Lee Se-Dol after the match against Google's artificial ... [ ] intelligence program, AlphaGo on March 10, 2016 in Seoul, South Korea. In May 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer defeated the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in an official match under tournament conditions. Fast forward to 2011, IBM extended development in machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval to build Watson, a system capable of defeating two highly decorated Jeopardy champions: Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. The progress of gaming innovation in the field of artificial intelligence was swift, but it wasn't until the introduction of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo in 2016 that things started to change dramatically. The AlphaGo supercomputer tackled the notion that Go, an ancient Chinese board game invented thousands of years ago, was unsolvable due to a near limitless combination of moves that a player can execute.