Go is a Chinese game that originated 3000 years ago and is the oldest board game continuously played. Extremely popular in China, Korea, and Japan, it is played nowadays around the world. Each player places black or white stones on a grid, trying to gain points by surrounding the other player's pieces with their own.
The rules are simpler than those of chess, but a player has a choice of 200 moves compared with only 20 in chess. There are more possible outcomes than there are atoms in the universe, making it "the holy grail of artificial intelligence." Can a machine play and win Go?
That is the challenge taken up by elite members of DeepMind, a software company owned by Google. After much research and debate, Demis Hassabis, the chief executive and his gifted team, decide to prepare their AlphaGo software for a series of games against Fan Hui, Europe's top player. Their program beats him in every game. In the A.I. community, programmers had predicted that it would take 10 years for intelligent computers to beat humans at Go.
DeepMind moves on by setting up a contest in Seoul, South Korea, between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, the world's top Go player. The popularity of the game and the chance to see an unproven A.I. challenger resulted in hundreds of millions of people from the around the world watching the four-game tournament.
Director Greg Kohs draws out all the high drama and adrenaline excitement of these games to decide the Master of Go. Here on the small stage is the battle of wits, strategies, mistakes, and bravado between the human Go champion and the A.I. contender. In this impressive documentary, Kohs probes the workings of the human mind under pressure, the role of mistakes, the computer's use of daring moves, and its creativity that surprises everyone watching the games.
This documentary convincingly raises the bar for our expectations of what A.I. machines can do.