CONCEPT
Move 37
The stone AlphaGo placed on the fifth line in the second game of its 2016 match against Lee Sedol—a move two and a half thousand years of human Go had never found, and the clearest exhibit in existence of a machine satisfying a demanding test for genuine creativity.
In March 2016, in Seoul,
the debate about machine creativity stopped being theoretical. DeepMind’s AlphaGo, playing the world-class Go professional Lee Sedol, placed its thirty-seventh stone in a position that violated every convention two and a half millennia of human mastery had established. Professional commentators were audibly bewildered; one assumed the machine had malfunctioned. It had not. As the game unfolded, the move revealed itself to be of extraordinary depth, and it contributed to a victory that ended one of the clearest remaining claims of human supremacy in a closed game.
Marcus du Sautoy returned to this moment throughout
The Creativity Code because it is the clearest instance he knows of a machine doing something that fits
the Lovelace test: the move was new, genuinely surprising to every expert present, and of unmistakable value—and no programmer had authored it. The system had taught itself, through millions of