By Matteo Wong
Publication Date: 2026-03-30 22:27:00
Thore Graepel may have been the first human to be defeated by a superintelligence. In 2015, on his first day as a researcher at Google DeepMind, he was challenged to compete against the earliest version of AlphaGo – a computer program developed by DeepMind that would prove highly effective in the ancient Chinese game of Weiqi (or Go, as it is commonly known in the West) that it changed the way people play and then upended the field of AI itself.
When Graepel was confronted with this, AlphaGo was just a “baby” project, as he put it to me, and he was an accomplished amateur player. But it still brought him down. Then, the following year, AlphaGo – now fully developed – faced off against a series of human champions, ultimately defeating Lee Sedol, widely considered the best player in the world, with a match score of 4-1. This month marked the tenth anniversary of that victory.
For decades, developing a program that plays Go at an elite level has been a notorious problem in computer science. Many people thought about it…
