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| Lee Se-dol / Korea Times file |
By Kim Da-hee
The historic match with Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, has influenced Korea's go world champion Lee Se-dol to improving his masterful skills even more.
Lee, who joined Korea's professional go (baduk) league at the age of 12, has gone from strength to strength. The world's top-ranked go player has won more than 1,000 games and won the world championship title 18 times.
With his aggressive and unconventional style, Lee never hid his confidence about his ability. Some of his comments when he was in his teens and in his 20s, including "I don't believe I will lose" in a private conversation, "I don't check past records of Chinese go players because they are not in the world ranking" and "I played the game half-heartedly because it was unfavorable to me, and I won," demonstrate his confidence.
Even before the historic match of human versus machine, Lee expressed strong confidence, saying, "I am confident I can win against the software."
However, the three consecutive losses in a five game series against his artificial intelligence opponent have changed his rhetoric from confident to somewhat humble.
"I, Lee Se-dol, lost, but not mankind," he said at a press conference after the third match. The comment implied that perhaps another human could beat the non-human opponent.
After Lee achieved his long-awaited win in the fourth match, a reporter asked, "Whereas AlphaGo has an immense volume of information about your play, you don't have that much information about Alpha-go. What do you think about that?"
Lee Se-dol replied: "I don't think that is a big problem. Fundamentally, the defeats were due to lack of my ability."
The match seems to have matured not only his comments, but also himself.
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