In March 2016 DeepMind’s AlphaGo played the Go champion Lee Sedol in Seoul, a five-game match watched by over 200 million people. AlphaGo won 4-1. But the match is remembered less for the score than for two individual moves, and DeepMind’s own account preserves both.
The first is Move 37 in game two. AlphaGo placed a stone that, by DeepMind’s telling, had “a 1 in 10,000 chance of being used” - a play so far outside human convention that professional commentators initially read it as an error. It was not. DeepMind calls it a “pivotal and creative move” that “upended centuries of traditional wisdom” and helped win the game. Lee Sedol himself reflected: “I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and that it was merely a machine. But when I saw this move, I changed my mind. Surely, AlphaGo is creative.”
The second move belongs to the human. In game four, trailing the machine, Lee answered with his Move 78 - a wedge play DeepMind describes as carrying its own “1 in 10,000 chance of being played,” nicknamed “God’s Touch.” It threw AlphaGo off, and Lee won that game, the only game the machine lost in the match.
The pairing is what makes the anecdote endure. The same vanishing probability - one in ten thousand - produced both a machine move that taught humans something new about an ancient game, and a human move inventive enough to beat the machine. The story is usually told as the moment AI surpassed people at Go. The fuller version is that it was also a moment a person, pushed by a machine, played the best move of his life.