AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol, also known as the DeepMind Challenge Match, was a five-game Go match between top Go player Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, a computer Go program developed by DeepMind, played in Seoul, South Korea between 9 and 15 March 2016. AlphaGo won all but the fourth game; all games were won by resignation. The match has been compared with the historic chess match between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov in 1997. Kasparov’s loss to Deep Blue is considered the moment a computer became better than humans at chess.
AlphaGo’s victory was a major milestone in artificial intelligence research. Most experts thought a Go program as powerful as AlphaGo was at least five years away; some experts thought that it would take at least another decade before computers would beat Go champions. Most observers at the beginning of the 2016 matches expected Lee to beat AlphaGo. With games such as checkers, chess, and now Go won by computer players, victories at popular board games can no longer serve as significant milestones for artificial intelligence in the way that they used to. Deep Blue’s Murray Campbell called AlphaGo’s victory ‘the end of an era… board games are more or less done and it’s time to move on.’
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The Daily Omnivore 