[Courtesy of Google Korea]
South Korean "Go" champion Lee Sedol has promised to go all out to score a clean victory against artificial intelligence, saying the match will be about all or nothing, but he lowered his expectations on Tuesday.
A prize fund of one million US dollars is at stake for the landmark five-game match starting on Wednesday at a hotel in Seoul. If its computer program AlphaGo wins, Google will donate the money to charities.
"I will try to score a 5-o victory because I think the match will go to AlphaGo if I lose just a single game," the 32 year-old champion of the highest rank with 18 international titles under his belt said late Monday after winning a domestic championship to pocket 50 million won (41,494 US dollars) in prize money.
On the eve of the historic event, however, Lee stimulated a nerve saying he was "a little nervous".
"I think AlphaGo can imitate human intuition to a certain degree," Lee told a news conference Tuesday after a presentation by Demis Hassabis, the head of Google's British-based tech firm DeepMind, on AlphaGo's algorithm.
Lee said the match would "go down" in the history of Go and artificial intelligence (AI).
It will be like playing alone but the computer does not understand the "beauty" of Go, he said, adding that would depend on how much he could reduce errors.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that AI's learning and experience will further help humans. "It will be a great day for humanity. Advanced AI and machine learning will make humans smarter and a better world."
The match, which begins at 1:00 pm (0400 GMT), was set up after Google's new computer program beat European go champion Fan Huia in all five games of a match in October, marking a significant advance in the development of artificial intelligence.
The computer's unexpected victory was likened to the defeat of reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 by IBM’s Deep Blue computer, which became a milestone in the advance of artificial intelligence over the human mind.
At stake is not just the prize money but scientific and technological progress.
Computers previously have surpassed humans for other games, including chess, checkers and backgammon. But the ancient Chinese board game has been seen as the most complex board game with an infinitely greater number of potential moves.
Scientists said the match, regardless of the result, would become a landmark in the history of AI. If AlphaGo wins, it would represent the most human-like machine yet created.
AlphaGo has a self-learning ability, and DeepMind hopes the match will provide a good chance to test AI's creative thinking. The technology used for the computer program can be applied to important real-world problems from climate modelling to complex disease analysis.
Aju News Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
