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.

The South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol has retired from professional play, telling Yonhap news agency that his decision was motivated by the ascendancy of AI. "With the debut of AI in Go games, I've realized that I'm not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts," Lee told Yonhap. "Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated." For years, Go was considered beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated computer programs. The ancient board game is famously complex, with more possible configurations for pieces than atoms in the observable universe. This reputation took a knock in 2016 when the Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind shocked the world by defeating Se-dol four matches to one with its AlphaGo AI system.

A master player of the Chinese strategy game Go has decided to retire, due to the rise of artificial intelligence that "cannot be defeated". Lee Se-dol is the only human to ever beat the AlphaGo software developed by Google's sister company Deepmind. In 2016, he took part in a five-match showdown against AlphaGo, losing four times but beating the computer once. The South Korean said he had decided to retire after realising: "I'm not at the top even if I become the number one." "There is an entity that cannot be defeated," the 18-time world Go champion told South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

We've written before about how Google is one of the most prominent tech companies leading the way when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence. As each month passes, its AI division, DeepMind, continues to reveal increasingly advanced AI capabilities, especially when it comes to AlphaGo. This particular AI is most well-known for mastering the ancient Chinese game of Go…and subsequently defeating 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol, which happened just last year. Since then, DeepMind has started adding imagination to its AI, and they also used gaming to teach the AI how to better manage tasks. AlphaGo even went on to defeat another top go player, Ke Jie, once again showing off its (potentially) unlimited potential to learn.

If you heard about AlphaGo's latest exploits last week -- crushing the world's best Go player and confirming that artificial intelligence had mastered the ancient Chinese board game -- you may have heard the news delivered in doomsday terms. There was a certain melancholy to Ke Jie's capitulation, to be sure. The 19-year-old Chinese prodigy declared he would never lose to an AI following AlphaGo's earthshaking victory over Lee Se-dol last year. To see him onstage last week, nearly bent double over the Go board and fidgeting with his hair, was to see a man comprehensively put in his place. But focusing on that would miss the point.

Google has challenged China's top Go player to a series of games against its artificial intelligence technology. It said the software would play a best-of-three match against Ke Jie, among other games against humans in the eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen from 23-27 May. Last year, the Google program recorded a 4-1 victory against one of South Korea's top Go players. One expert said that result had come as a surprise. "A lot of AI researchers have been working on Go because it's the most challenging board game we have," said Calum Chace, author of Surviving AI. "The conventional wisdom was that machines would ultimately triumph but it would take 10 years or so. "The win was a big wake-up call for a lot of people, including many outside the AI community." Google's AlphaGo software was developed by British computer company DeepMind, which was bought by the US search firm in 2014. Its defeat of Lee Se-dol in March 2016 is seen as a landmark moment, similar to that of IBM's Deep Blue AI beating Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997. Several of the moves AlphaGo made defied conventional wisdom but ended up paying off. However, many Go aficionados did not recognise Mr Lee as the world's top player at the time of the contest. So, the new competition against 19-year-old Mr Ke - who is the current number one according to a popular but unofficial player-ranking system - has the potential to bring additional prestige to Google. "We've been hard at work improving AlphaGo to become even more creative, and since playing Lee Se-dol, the program has continued to learn through self-play training," a spokeswoman for DeepMind told the BBC. "We intend to publish more scientific papers in the future, which will include further details of AlphaGo's progress." Google added that Mr Lee would also be invited, but was not sure if he would attend. Over the past year, DeepMind's technology has also been used to find ways to reduce energy bills at Google's data centres as well as to try to improve care in British hospitals. A fresh wave of positive publicity could help Google find further uses for its tech. "If it loses this match, a lot of people will be delighted to claim that Google and DeepMind has overpromised and that this is the kind of hype we always get with AI," commented Mr Chace. "But I wouldn't have thought Google is taking a huge risk.

Humans have been taking a beating from computers lately. The 4-1 defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Se-Dol by Google's AlphaGo artificial intelligence (AI) is only the latest in a string of pursuits in which technology has triumphed over humanity. Self-driving cars are already less accident-prone than human drivers, the TV quiz show Jeopardy! is a lost cause, and in chess humans have fallen so woefully behind computers that a recent international tournament was won by a mobile phone. Researchers from Western Sydney University two reasons why AIs are'our greatest threat. The first being they are trained with logic and heuristics.

After suffering its first defeat in the Google DeepMind Challenge Match on Sunday, the Go-playing AI AlphaGo has beaten world-class player Lee Se-dol for a fourth time to win the five-game series 4-1 overall. The final game proved to be a close one, with both sides fighting hard and going deep into overtime. AlphaGo is an AI developed by Google-owned British company DeepMind, and had already wrapped up a historic victory on Saturday by becoming the first ever computer program to beat a top-level Go player. The win came after a "bad mistake" made early in the game, according to DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, leaving AlphaGo "trying hard to claw it back." By winning the final game despite its blip in the fourth, AlphaGo has demonstrated beyond doubt its superiority over one of the world's best Go players, reaffirming a major milestone for artificial intelligence in the process. It was "the most mindblowing game experience we've had so far," said DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis at the post-match press conference, with an "incredibly close and tense finish." Lee said that he felt sorry the match was coming to an end, while expressing how difficult it has been from a psychological perspective.

After suffering its first defeat in the Google DeepMind Challenge Match on Sunday, the Go-playing AI AlphaGo has beaten world-class player Lee Se-dol for a fourth time to win the five-game series 4-1 overall. The final game proved to be a close one, with both sides fighting hard and going deep into overtime. AlphaGo is an AI developed by Google-owned British company DeepMind, and had already wrapped up a historic victory on Saturday by becoming the first ever computer program to beat a top-level Go player. The win came after a "bad mistake" made early in the game, according to DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, leaving AlphaGo "trying hard to claw it back." By winning the final game despite its blip in the fourth, AlphaGo has demonstrated beyond doubt its superiority over one of the world's best Go players, reaffirming a major milestone for artificial intelligence in the process. It was "the most mindblowing game experience we've had so far," said DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis at the post-match press conference, with an "incredibly close and tense finish." Lee said that he felt sorry the match was coming to an end, while expressing how difficult it has been from a psychological perspective.

In a match last October, the AlphaGo program developed by Google's "DeepMind" subsidiary beat, 5 games to 0, the French professional player Fan Hui,1 who is ranked 2 dan (on the professional scale from 1 dan to 9 dan) and is today Europe's best player. The story was related by the journal Nature.2 This was the first time that a computer beats a professional player. But in the world of artificial intelligence, the progress demonstrated by the AlphaGo victory wasn't expected for another ten years or so. The moment of truth, however, will take place between March 9-15 in Seoul, where AlphaGo will face the South Korean Lee Se-dol, who is 9 dan, and is considered the best player in the world as well as a Go living legend. This new game, which will be broadcast live on the Web, comes with a 1,000,000 prize for the human champion if he wins.