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AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol in First Game of Historic "Man vs Machine" Showdown

AlphaGo scored a stunning win against Lee Sedol 9P in the first game of the historic match between Google Deep Mind's AI and the world's top professional go player, forcing Lee to resign in just 186 moves. "#AlphaGo WINS!!!! We landed it on the moon," tweeted DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis after the game. "So proud of the team!! Respect to the amazing Lee Sedol too." At a jam-packed post-game press conference, Lee admitted “I was so surprised. Actually, I never imagined that I would lose. It’s so shocking.”Cho Hanseung 9p said that “AlphaGo is much stronger than before, when it played against Fan Hui 2p!” Click here to see the English game commentary by Michael Redmond 9P with Chris Garlock on the Google Deepmind YouTube Channel. The match began on Wednesday, March 9, at the Four Seasons Hotel, in Seoul, Korea. Lee is playing for one million dollars and, perhaps more importantly, the pride of countless humans around the world who don’t yet wish to see computers triumph in the ancient board game go.

 DeepMind, on the other hand, seek to test the abilities of their machine and make another step along the road towards a general purpose learning algorithm. Game two of the match is scheduled to take place Thursday March 10 (local time; see below for US details) and Lee said "I am looking forward to tomorrow." Includes reporting by Go Game Guru; click here for their full report, photos and a game record. The second game in the Lee Sedol-AlphaGo match will be Wednesday, March 9, 8p PST (11p EST). The match will be livestreamed on DeepMind’s YouTube channel with English commentary by Michael Redmond 9p with American Go E-Journal Managing Editor Chris Garlock.