Google Beating Grandmaster Sedol Is Bigger Than IBM Beating Kasparov - Singularity HUB

It's been an emotional week in the realm of game AI as the world watched the historic five-game showdown between legendary Go world champion Lee Sedol and Google DeepMind's famed deep learning AI AlphaGo. All five games were held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, and as events played out, millions around the world became increasingly captivated. Anticipation for the match began growing in January, when Google's UK-based AI group DeepMind, led by CEO Demis Hassabis, announced their computer algorithm AlphaGo defeated three-time European Go champion Fan Hui 5 games to 0--a victory some experts didn't expect a computer to achieve for a decade. At the end of a Google blog post announcing the win was the promise of a best-of-five face-off between AlphaGo and 18-time international Go champion Lee Sedol, a match equivalent to IBM's Deep Blue defeat of Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997. Notably, Go is inherently more complex than chess and AlphaGo, at least in part, trained itself to play the game.