Korean 9-Dan Go Player, Opponent of AlphaGo
Lee Sedol (1983– ) is a Korean professional 9-dan Go player who won several international Go titles, acknowledged as one of the top professional players of the 2010s. In 2016 he played a five-game match against DeepMind’s AlphaGo, at last losing by one win and four losses, the first time a top human Go player lost to an AI system in a formal match, and since the number of possible Go positions far exceeds chess and Go was long seen as an intellectual stronghold hard for machines to crack, this defeat provoked worldwide attention and discussion far exceeding the 1997 "Deep Blue beats Kasparov" event. The one game Lee Sedol won in the series is to this day the only record of a human player beating AlphaGo in a formal match, a victory he himself called "an incomparably precious game." Lee Sedol announced his retirement in 2019, saying that even if he became number one he could never in the end beat an "entity that cannot be defeated," a philosophical retirement remark thereafter widely cited.
Already behind in the overall score, Lee Sedol in the fourth game of the series made a move thereafter called the "hand of God," which for a time threw AlphaGo’s move choices into clear confusion, and at last won this only human victory of the series. This victory was thereafter replayed and analyzed again and again, and left this originally rather tragic human-machine match a precious record of a high moment of human wisdom.
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