An Overview of Deep Learning for Curious People
Lilian Weng
AlphaGo defeated professional Go player Lee Sedol 4-1 in 2016, demonstrating deep learning's ability to master a game previously thought computationally intractable due to its exponential complexity compared to chess. The match occurred in 2016 and involved a nine-dan ranked world champion losing to the AI system. The victory generated significant public attention to artificial intelligence and deep learning research.
Why it matters
(The post was originated from my talk for WiMLDS x Fintech meetup hosted by Affirm.) I believe many of you have watched or heard of the games between AlphaGo and professional Go player Lee Sedol in 2016. Lee has the highest rank of nine dan and many world championships. No doubt, he is one of the best Go players in the world, but he lost by 1-4 in this series versus AlphaGo. Before this, Go was considered to be an intractable game for computers to master, as its simple rules lay out an exponential number of variations in the board positions, many more than what in Chess. This event surely highlighted 2016 as a big year for AI. Because of AlphaGo, much attention has been attracted to the progress of AI.
