Year in review: AlphaGo scores a win for artificial intelligence
Computer defeats world champion Go player
GO GAME CHANGER AlphaGo won four games to Lee Sedol’s one in their March Go matchup. Sedol, a South Korean professional player, studies the board after his third loss.
Lee Jin-man/AP Photo
In a hotel ballroom in Seoul, South Korea, early in 2016, a centuries-old strategy game offered a glimpse into the fantastic future of computing.
The computer program AlphaGo bested a world champion player at the Chinese board game Go, four games to one (SN Online: 3/15/16). The victory shocked Go players and computer gurus alike. “It happened much faster than people expected,” says Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “A year before the match, people were saying that it would take another 10 years for us to reach this point.”
The match was a powerful demonstration of the potential
