This feature-length documentary chronicles DeepMind's journey to develop AlphaGo and its historic 2016 match against legendary Go champion Lee Sedol.
🎬 Now available, the follow up to AlphaGo: The Thinking Game youtu.be/d95J8yzvjbQ 🎬
The Thinking Game takes you on a journey into the heart of DeepMind, capturing a team striving to unravel the mysteries of intelligence and life itself.
Filmed over five years by the award winning team behind AlphaGo, the documentary examines how Demis Hassabis’s extraordinary beginnings shaped his lifelong pursuit of artificial general intelligence. It chronicles the rigorous process of scientific discovery, documenting how the team moved from mastering complex strategy games to the ups and downs of solving a 50-year-old "protein folding problem" with AlphaFold.
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AlphaGo - The Movie
With more board configurations than there are atoms in the universe, the ancient Chinese game of Go has long been considered a grand challenge for artificial intelligence.
On March 9, 2016, the worlds of Go and artificial intelligence collided in South Korea for an extraordinary best-of-five-game competition, coined The DeepMind Challenge Match. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched as a legendary Go master took on an unproven AI challenger for the first time in history.
Directed by Greg Kohs and with an original score by Academy Award nominee Hauschka, AlphaGo had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. It has since gone on to win countless awards and near universal praise for a story that chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?
Best documentary winner: Denver International Film Festival (2017), Warsaw International Film Festival (2017), and Traverse City Film Festival (2017).
Official selection at Tribeca Film Festival (2017), BFI London Film Festival (2017), and Critics' Choice Documentary Awards (2017).
Find out more: alphagomovie.com/
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"I want my style of Go to be something different, something new, my own thing, something that no one has thought of before." Lee Sedol, Go Champion (18 World Titles).
"We think of DeepMind as kind of an Apollo program effort for AI. Our mission is to fundamentally understand intelligence and recreate it artificially." Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder & CEO, DeepMind.
"The Game of Go is the holy grail of artificial intelligence. Everything we've ever tried in AI, it just falls over when you try the game of Go." Dave Silver, Lead Researcher for AlphaGo.
Why it's here
10 people recommend this
What people say. Recommended as a deeply moving and beautifully produced documentary about a landmark moment in artificial intelligence history.
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eyerowon Hacker News • Recommends
On “ACM Prize in Computing Awarded to AlphaGo Developer”
As a long-time Go player and ML guy who even built his own (albeit shitty) Go AI in college, I'm a bit biased, but watching the AlphaGo-Lee Sedol match really felt like watching our generation's moon landing. If y'all haven't already, there's a new AlphaGo documentary made by DeepMind on YT: link to this video . Brought tears to my eyes. Both a triumph for humanity in building an unbelievable machine like this, and a loss for humanity in that the infinite mystery of Go will be diminished, and again a triumph for humanity in Lee Sedol's brilliant win in Game 4...
If you haven't seen it, the documentary on DeepMind's AlphaGo is very well done. The climax revolves around the AI expressing what we humans call "creativity" in a match against decorated player Lee Sedol. Watching Lee Sedol's reaction is deeply moving. Free to watch on YouTube: link to this video
I remember first discovering the game of Go, after watching the AlphaGo Documentary 1. I highly recommend it, will definitely be signing up for this, I usually play on mobile :) 1link to this video
On “In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future (2016)”
I consider AlphaGo - The Movie 1 to be a timeless classic that will never feel outdated. In my opinion, it surpasses even Hollywood productions, despite being based on true events and filmed live with real people. I'm ranking it as #2, though, because I still believe Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone presentation 2 is the greatest live tech event ever captured on film. Hearing the crowd screaming when seeing some tricks and techniques ( eg. slide to unlock , pinch to zoom and scrolling up ) on how to use the phone does really triggers some haptic feedback in my heart because we are now so used to these tricks that were pure magic back then. ______________________________ 1. link to this video 2. link
I became interested in learning Go recently after watching the magnificent AlphaGo movie 1 which is free on YouTube. I highly recommend giving it a watch if you haven't already. 1link to this video
I was really impressed by "AlphaGo - The Movie", despite not knowing much about Go, because the way they told the story, people from the Asian countries were so sure their champion would win a Go tournament against a computer, that were stunned into a new consciousness about artificial intelligence when the computer won. This started an arms race in AI is what I gather. Edit: Full movie for free on YouTube: AlphaGo - The Movie | Full award-winning documentary link to this video
On “Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?”
Here is a list of 20 documentaries I have come to love and return to when I come across them. There is no specific order to them. Enjoy! The * next to the number indicates the last 4 years. If you have seen one listed that you'd like to share what you think about please leave a comment with this structure # in the list Comment... . i.e. 1 Loved learning about Noyce. What a guy. 1. Silicon Valley: Where the Future | PBS: American Experience 1:23:192013 History of the how Silicon Valley came to be. William Shockley. Robert Noyce. Fairchild Semiconductor, The Traitorous Eight. Homepage: link Kanopy: link Where to Watch: link 2. Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware | Wired UK…
On “In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future (2016)”
For those who missed what happened back then, the AlphaGo Movie is really worth watching: link to this video Not very technical, not about Go tactics either, but it's just a very well-done movie about the people involved.
Reminds me of AlphaGo It didn't try to maximise by how much it won, but just that it won. Apparently it changed the meta for human pkayers. If you have the time for it, the movie/doc is worth watching link to this video
On “Computer Science research papers related to chess?”
Are you referring to *playing* Chess? Or like algorithmic/combinatorial theory?
A ton of game playing AI efforts have evolved in the past 5 years or so.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815
Not chess but still awesome
link to this video
And you can probably read about Stockfish too, that's likely published, but am on mobile and tired so you can search 😁
On “An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep”
What do you make of the documentary on AlphaGo where the AI did seemingly suicidal and incomprehensible moves to the human masters but won in the end, baffling everyone? link to this video
> The reduction of the board size and the number of pieces from standard chess was due to the very limited capacity of computers at the time . I wonder what the authors might have achieved having access to modern computers that are billions times faster than their machines. > The computer played three games. The first was played against itself. The second one was against a strong human player who played without a queen. The human player won. Again, I wonder what they would think seeing AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol 1,2 1. link 2. link to this video
On “In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future (2016)”
…a 5-0 win against the program. Kasparov was pretty cocky as well in the 1990s. You'd think someone would have warned him! "Hey Sedol. Cool your jets, these guys wouldn't be spending so much money just to embarrass themselves." DeepMind was definitely way more polite than IBM, so that was good to see. The Deep Blue team were sorta jerks to Gary. 1. link to this video…
