It doesn’t sound like it means much to declare that Lee Se-dol has announced his retirement as one of the top Go players the world has ever seen.
Perhaps it isn’t his retirement that matters. But his reasoning.
Go, for those who are unaware, is an ancient Chinese abstract board game that far exceeds chess in both simplicity and complexity. By that I mean that the rules are far simpler, but the game itself is magnitudes more difficult to understand and master. It has been said there are more positions that you can have on a Go board than there are atoms in the universe. Without going into detail, I will vastly simplify the concept and tell you it is about placing dots on a grid to contain larger areas than your opponent.
Lee Se-dol is the only human to have ever defeated AlphaGo, an AI Go player created by Deepmind, a subsidiary of Google. In the latest tournament, AlphaGo won four out of the five games played.
And Lee Se-dol quit playing Go.
His reasoning is that “there is an entity that cannot be defeated”.
In 1986, I was working for a company called Institutional Computer Development Corp, one of five or six employees at a place that essentially sold chess computers and helped develop new software. Now it’s a gamestore and website called USAChess.com. This was…
