The sweeping victory means far more than the US $1 million prize, which Google’s London-based acquisition, DeepMind, says it will give to charity. Chess, AI’s original touchstone, fell to the machines 19 years ago, but Go had been expected to last for many years to come. Thus falls the last and computationally hardest game that programmers have taken as a test of machine intelligence. Sedol is one of the greatest modern players of the ancient Chinese game. AlphaGo, a largely self-taught Go-playing AI, last night won the fifth and final game in a match held in Seoul, South Korea, against that country’s Lee Sedol.
