AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol 4–1 at Go
DeepMind's AlphaGo beat 18-time world champion Lee Sedol 4–1 in Seoul, a milestone many experts had expected to be a decade away.
Key facts
- Match played 9–15 March 2016 in Seoul
- Result: AlphaGo 4, Lee Sedol 1
- Combined deep policy/value networks with Monte Carlo tree search
- Nature paper published 27 January 2016 (after beating Fan Hui 5–0 in Oct 2015)
- Move 37 in game 2 became famous for its creativity
What happened
AlphaGo won the five-game match, with Lee Sedol's only win coming in game 4.
Why it matters
A watershed for deep reinforcement learning and a 'Sputnik moment' that spurred massive AI investment, particularly in China.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- DeepMind's DQN learns to play Atari games from pixels ★★★★
- AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero master games through pure self-play ★★★★★
- IBM Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov ★★★★★
Sources (3)
- paperMastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search (Nature, DOI)
- officialGoogle DeepMind: AlphaGo
- discussionWikipedia: AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol
id: 2016-03-15-alphago-lee-sedol · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline