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Google's software beats human champ for third time in chess-like game

 
Published March 13, 2016

SEOUL, South Korea — Google's software defeated a human champion for the third straight time Saturday in an ancient Chinese chess-like game called Go, clinching the best-of-five series and establishing its superiority in the game that was long thought to be the realm of humans.

South Korea's Lee Sedol, one of the world's best Go players, remained winless against AlphaGo, Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence machine, after another close match in Seoul. Despite losing the series, Lee was scheduled to play twice more against AlphaGo, today and Tuesday.

The match was viewed as an important test of how far research into artificial intelligence has come in its quest to create machines smarter than humans. Go fans, many of them in Asia, believed Go would be too complex for machines to master. Some thought it would take at least another decade for computers to beat human champions.

Lee looked shaken in the post-match news conference, apologizing to his fans for what he said was a "powerless display" against the game-playing machine.

In Go, which is considered to be far more complex than chess, two players take turns putting black or white stones on a 19-by-19 square grid. The goal is to put more territory under one's control by surrounding vacant areas with the stones.