March 2016Peer-reviewedWell documented
AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol
On the timeline · around March 2016 ·
What happened
DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, one of the world's greatest players of Go, four games to one in a match in Seoul. Go, with more possible positions than atoms in the universe, had been considered far beyond the reach of computers for decades to come.
Why it matters
AlphaGo's win — combining deep neural networks with reinforcement learning, and producing moves no human had considered — was a landmark that showed AI could master intuition-heavy tasks.