AlphaGo, a program developed by the London-based laboratory DeepMind, defeated the South Korean professional Lee Sedol four games to one in a five-game match in Seoul.
Go had long been considered resistant to computer play because of the enormous number of possible board positions. AlphaGo combined deep neural networks with tree search and training on both human games and self-play.
The match drew tens of millions of viewers in East Asia and is widely cited as the moment machine learning entered mainstream public awareness, four years before large language models did the same.
