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Demis Hassabis joins UCL for exclusive showing of AlphaGo movie

12 March 2018

AI pioneer Demis Hassabis visited UCL last week for an exclusive showing of AlphaGo.

Demis Hassabis

AlphaGo is the movie charting the historic show-down between Go grandmaster Lee Sedol and computer program AlphaGo, in which machine defeated man 4 to 1.

UCL alumnus Demis, founder and CEO of DeepMind, also stayed for a short Q&A after the movie to answer questions from students about the future of AI.

The powerful movie tracks the development of the AlphaGo program, which took on the ancient Chinese game of Go because the complexity of the game – said to have more board configurations than there are atoms in the universe – makes it a stretching challenge for artificial intelligence.

The journey culminates in a tense seven day tournament in Seoul, South Korea, in March 2016, when renowned Go master Lee Sedol took on the computer program in a best-of-five match, watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Initially confidence that human intuition, expertise and creativity would easily defeat the computer, the world of Go was initially rocked and eventually intrigued by the performance of AlphaGo.

After the screening, Demis talked more about the huge opportunities of AI, describing it as a powerful tool that could hugely accelerate scientific discovery. He also reflected on the potential challenges of AI, saying:

“All technology is neutral; it depends how we as a society choose to deploy it. Transformational technology is needed and I believe this will be beneficial to humankind.”

Demis was joined at the event by Thore Graepel, Professor of Machine Learning at UCL and research lead at DeepMind, and Larissa Suzuki, UCL alumna and computer sciences entrepreneur.

The AlphaGo movie is available through Google Play, iTunes and Amazon. Fine out more here: https://www.alphagomovie.com/