2016

AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol

DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats world Go champion Lee Sedol 4-1, conquering a game with more possible positions than atoms in the universe. Move 37 of Game 2 becomes legendary — a play so unconventional that human experts initially call it a mistake, then realize it's brilliant. Lee Sedol says he's "speechless." The victory shatters the assumption that Go's reliance on intuition and pattern recognition makes it uniquely human. AlphaGo didn't just learn the game — it discovered strategies humans never imagined in 2,500 years of play.