Google AI beats one of world's best Go players

The ancient Chinese game Go might not be dominated by humans much longer. 

Until recently, AIs from Google, Facebook and others were able to win against some human opponents, but not the top professionals. Then, in January, Google's AlphaGo AI beat the European Champ Fan Hui. And now, the same AI beat the world's top player of the last decade, Lee Sedol, after a three-and-a-half hour game. 

The match was the first in Google's DeepMind Challenge Match, a $1-million, 5-game challenge played at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul. Lee resigned with about half an hour on his clock; you can check out the entire game, below. 

Go is played by two players, who place white and black pegs on a 19x19 grid board, fighting to "capture" the opponent's pegs. It's a hard game for an AI to master due to the sheer number of combinations involved. According to Google, there are more possible board configurations than the number of atoms in the universe, making it very hard for the AI to simply calculate all the possibilities in advance. 

It's not all over for Lee, who has never played against a computer before; he can still win that $1 million prize if he's able to win three out of four remaining matches. If Google's AlphaGo wins, the prize money will be donated to UNICEF, STEM and Go charities.

The next four matches are scheduled to be played Thursday, Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday. You can find the video streams here. 

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