SEOUL: A Google-developed computer programme won its best-of-five match-up with a South Korean Go grandmaster on Saturday, taking an unassailable 3-0 lead to score a major victory for a new style of "intuitive" artificial intelligence (AI).
The programme, AlphaGo, took a little over four hours to secure its third consecutive win over Lee Se-Dol -- one of the ancient game's greatest modern players with 18 international titles to his name.
Lee, who has topped the world ranking for much of the past decade and had predicted an easy victory when accepting the AlphaGo challenge, now finds himself fighting to avoid a whitewash in the two remaining dead rubbers on Sunday and Tuesday.