AlphaGo defeated world champion Lee Sedol at Go in 2016.
The five-game DeepMind Challenge Match took place in Seoul from March 9 to 15, 2016. AlphaGo, developed by Google DeepMind, won the series 4–1, becoming the first computer Go program to defeat a top-level professional in a formal match under standard conditions.
The result was remarkable because Go has an enormous number of possible positions, making brute-force calculation far more difficult than in chess. AlphaGo combined deep neural networks with tree-search techniques, learning from expert games and later improving through self-play. Its victory was widely viewed as a major milestone in artificial intelligence.
A common mix-up is with IBM’s Deep Blue, which defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Siri is a voice assistant, while Watson became famous for question-answering and its Jeopardy! victories. Lee Sedol won the fourth game, but AlphaGo won the overall match.