Board Game Player Duels Google AI For $1m Prize

The world's best player of ancient board game Go is taking on a Google artificial intelligence (AI) computer for a chance to win $1m.

Lee Sedol is battling against Google's AlphaGo system in five matches over five days - in a duel which has been likened to chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov's match against the IBM Deep Blue computer.

But Mr Lee has suffered a setback after losing the first match in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

His defeat came after a promising start for the champion player, but the AI system took control over the game in the final 20 minutes.

When AlphaGo gained an unassailable lead, Mr Lee then forfeited the game.

In October last year AlphaGo became the first computer system to beat a professional player at the complex game.

But beating the best player of the past decade is another landmark in AI computing.

Go involves placing black and white tiles on a 19x19 board while trying to remove your opponent's pieces.

Because there are so many squares and placing combinations, it is far harder for a computer to master than chess.

On each turn in chess, there are 35 legal moves, whereas in Go there are around 250.

As recently as 2014, Go game AI expert Remi Coulom said it was likely to be another decade before a computer beat the world's top players.

Google's AlphaGo was developed by British computer company DeepMind which was bought by Google in 2014.