Google Deepmind artificial intelligence beats world's best Go player Lee Sedol in landmark game
Go depends mostly on intuition, since it is so complex — and the victory shows that computers are well on their way to learning the powers that we thought belonged only to humans
![South Korea’s Lee Sedol, the world’s top Go player, bows during a news conference ahead of matches against Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo, in Seoul, South Korea, March 8, 2016](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2016/03/09/08/googleg.jpg)
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![Louise Thomas](https://static.independent.co.uk/static-assets/support-us/louise-thomas.png)
Louise Thomas
Editor
A computer programme has won a game of Go against the world's best player, in a huge breakthrough for artificial intelligence.
Google’s AlphaGo computer has beaten South Korean human and Go champion Lee Sedol in the first of five matches.
The Deepmind-based computer's victory in the complex Chinese game marks a major event in the development of artificial intelligence — the game depends hugely in intuition, since there are so many possibilities, and so mastery of the game was previously thought to be a human skill.
The game is said to be one of the most creative and complicated in the world, and usually takes years for even humans to master.
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Show all 7AI experts had previously thought that it would take another ten years of development for computers to get good enough at the game to beat a human. But then AlphaGo beat the European champion last year, and now appears to be on track for beating Lee, the world's best Go player.
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