AlphaGo, an AI system developed by Google DeepMind, beat South Korean professional Lee Sedol by four games to one in a five-game match in Seoul. The result was widely seen as a landmark for artificial intelligence.
What happened
- The match ran from 9 to 15 March 2016, and AlphaGo won the first three games to secure victory.
- Lee won the fourth game, with a move that exposed a weakness in the system, before AlphaGo took the final game.
- AlphaGo combined deep neural networks with tree search, and learned from both human games and games played against itself.
- The match was watched by millions of people, particularly across East Asia.
Why it mattered
Go had long been considered too complex for computers to master, so the win signalled a step change in machine learning and helped fuel the wave of AI investment that followed.
Lessons for organisations
Rapid AI advances can arrive sooner than expected. Organisations should keep AI developments on their risk and opportunity radar and build governance before adopting AI tools, rather than after. Staff should also understand the limits of the AI tools they use at work.
Source: Nature
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