Google's AI Wins Fifth And Final Game Against Go Genius Lee Sedol

In the final game of their historic match, Google's artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, finishing the best-of-five series with four wins and one loss. The win puts an exclamation point on a significant moment for artificial intelligence. Over the last twenty-five years, machines have beaten the best humans at checkers, chess, Othello, even Jeopardy! But this is the first time a machine has topped the very best at Go--a 2,500-year-old game that's exponentially more complex than chess and requires, at least among humans, an added degree of intuition. Game Five grew into the most exciting of the series, a game balanced on a knife edge. The victory is notable in its own right. But this week's events are even more significant when you consider that the machine learning technologies underpinning Google's machine, known as AlphaGo, are already pushing their way into real-world applications.