The much-anticipated game between AlphaGo and World Champion, Lee Sedol, will be livestreamed by Youtube. This match which has been scheduled for March 9- 15 will be live-streamed on the Official Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) DeepMind Youtube channel. The competition is expected to be watched by millions since there is a huge uncertainty about who will win the game. Google’s AlphaGo AI came into the limelight when it managed to beat Fan Hui five times in a row last year. Fan Hui was a three-time European champion and was ranked as a ‘2 dan’ player.
This time, round AlphaGo will be facing a tougher challenge, Lee Sedol. He is currently the best player in Go in the world and has won the second highest number of international titles. He is also the youngest Go player to reach professional rank of9-dan at the age of 21. When he was questioned about what he expect he noted that this was the first time a computer has challengeda top human in an evengame, but he is confident he can win the game at least for this time.
By the statement at least for this time, Lee was acknowledging the rapid speed with which AlphaGo was progressing. Experts had initially claimed that it would take another ten years for computers to beat master Go player but this was not the case with AlphaGo and Hui.
AI programs were only capable ofbeating averylow-levelplayer, but AlphaGo had managed to beat a pro-Go player. AlphaGo does not use a similar strategy to that of chess computer; calculating ahead, rather it uses strategies used by Go masters. It had reinforced this by playing numerous games.
Demis Hassabis, founder and CEO of DeepMind announced the event. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for around $400 million. It has helped in the development of AlphaGo AI. It uses neural networks which are a system that input through layers of virtual neurons.
The event will be heldI South Korea, Sedol home, and the winner will bag a cool $1 million.
