Director: Greg Kohs
Featuring: Ioannis Antogolou, Lucas Baker, Nick Bostrom, Yoo Changhyuk, Nam Chi-Hyung, Hyeyeon Cho, Joseph Choi, John Daugman, Lee Sedol and more.
Duration: 1h 30mins
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With more board configurations than there are atoms in the universe, the ancient Chinese game of ‘Go’ has long been considered a grand challenge for artificial intelligence.
What makes playing Go such a fascinating event is the game Go does not rely on calculated results based on specific moves like those in chess, it relies more on an intuitive sense of what move to make next. Meaning this, of course, requires a particular more intuitive sort of artificial intelligence developed by a team of engineers and coders for years. It makes for a fascinating journey that begins with a challenge to the European Go champion who AlphaGo defeated easily five times years before the program was supposed to be ready. Afterwards, he joins the team to make AlphaGo even better in preparation to challenge the global champion Lee Sedol.
On March 9, 2016, the worlds of Go and artificial intelligence collided in South Korea for an extraordinary best-of-five-game competition, coined The Google DeepMind Challenge Match. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched as a legendary Go master took on an unproven AI challenger for the first time in history with somewhat surprising results. The matches are surprisingly captivating and emotionally engaging.
The film does raise some interesting questions about actual artificial intelligence beyond the sort depicted in science fiction movies, and of course, human nature. I did not envy the champion being put under the spotlight and under that kind of pressure. If you have any interest in current scientific research and development, this is a film worth seeing for several reasons.
