Gigaom AI Minute – March 9

Transcript

On this date, March 9, in 2016, AlphaGo played Lee Sedol in the first of five games of Go that would constitute their tournament. The AI appeared to get off to a rocky start. AlphaGo takes a long time to make any move, whether it's the first or last. The fact that it took two full minutes to display its first move had many observers wondering if the system crashed or was so simple that it didn't even know where to place its first piece.

However, AlphaGo played a marvelous game and, toward the end, positioned itself in such a way that Lee had to resign. The result was extreme shock. Most observers didn't express sadness so much as utter amazement. Just a day earlier it seemed inconceivable that this, the most elegant, sublime and nuanced of all games, which had tantalized and challenged people for 2,500 years, would be mastered by a machine that no one had heard of, and that would go on to defeat one of the best human players ever.

If you're from North America, Europe or some other area where Go is not so pervasive in the culture, this might be difficult to understand. Imagine if your experience with computers was that they could help you find rhyming words for limericks, and then all of a sudden a computer turned up that wrote a novel so masterful, so brilliant, so intricate and so moving that it was better than any novel that had ever been written by any human in the history of the language. You might just sit there, reading it over and over, trying to wrap your mind around what had just happened and what it meant.

After the game, Lee said he had underestimated his opponent. He seemed every bit as stunned as everyone else. One could imagine that he would show up at the game the next day resolved to win.