When Lee Sedol, the world champion Go player, defeated the AI AlphaGo in their fourth match, the people of South Korea rejoiced.
Go, an ancient strategy board game, is integral to South Korean culture and Sedol is one of the greatest players in the country’s history, but he had already lost the five-game series against AlphaGo, having resigned from the first three matches. The South Koreans didn’t care – he was the human champion who had scored a win against an AI that had seemed omnipotent at the ‘most complex game devised by man.’
Sedol lost the fifth game too and three years later in 2019, he retired from the professional circuit, stating that even if he was number one, there was an ‘entity that could not be defeated.’ He now trains other AI Go programs.