Documentary about AlphaGo debuts at New York film festival
AlphaGo, a film charting the progress of the eponymous AI programme that defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol, has debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The film, which is directed by Greg Kohs, charts the stories of both the development team at Google DeepMind responsible for building and training the AI, and those of the Go players – including European champion Fan Hui and world champion Lee Sedol – as they grapple with the realisation that the AI has exceeded their expertise.

In a film that documents a technical achievement, I saw two human stories. There is the work of the DeepMind scientists and their impressive quest to reach this AI milestone. But there is also the story of Fan Hui and others who dedicate their lives to studying this game. Cinematically, the latter story shines. How does it feel to no longer be the best? If mastering Go “requires human intuition,” what is it like to have a piece of one’s humanity challenged?

As AI gradually changes our daily lives, we will all need to grapple with these questions. For Fan Hui, in one moment he is the European Go champion. In the next he is hopelessly overpowered by a combination of human engineering, machine learning, and massive-scale computation. When the media documents his loss for public consumption, his wife tells him “don’t look at the Internet,” lest he see criticism from his peers regarding his play. But Hui quickly recovers, in his own colorful and good-natured way. He eagerly becomes a collaborator, working with DeepMind to further evaluate and strengthen AlphaGo, in preparation for even stronger opponents. “[I] do my best to protect human intelligence,” Hui says with a smile, after helping to accomplish the opposite.

The film crescendos to a five-game matchup between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, one of the world’s best Go players, in Seoul, South Korea, in March 2016. At the time, the match was widely covered in the media, and the outcome won’t surprise any theatergoers. Nonetheless, the film succeeds at building suspense. The AlphaGo team is anxiously making final tweaks, trying to diagnose some rare but potentially embarrassing flaws. As a world champion, Sedol struggles with unusual pressure. After all, he is not just representing himself; he is representing humanity.

The film succeeds at overcoming another obstacle: making Go feel like a spectator sport even to the uninitiated. The matches are slow, and unless you are a Go expert, the action is difficult to discern. But with careful editing, the film conveys AlphaGo’s actions through Sedol’s reactions. Hours of Sedol’s penetrating thought are distilled into a series of nervous twitches, gasps, and frustrated expressions that reveal a man, at the pinnacle of his craft, facing a new kind of challenge.

In the AlphaGo control room, we see a different picture. The room is brimming with emotion, but from the creators rather than the creation. There are moments of anxiety and joy as the DeepMind scientists monitor various diagnostics, trying to analyze what AlphaGo is thinking. Oblivious to it all, AlphaGo presses on, through good moves and bad.

There are some added theatrics. Earlier, as the DeepMind team prepares for the flight to Seoul, AlphaGo (version 18) is loaded onto a laptop and tucked into a briefcase—as if Sedol could just open the laptop, boot up AlphaGo, and begin the match. In reality, AlphaGo requires a veritable computing arsenal, running on 1,202 CPUs and 176 GPUs for the match against Hui, and possibly more for the match against Sedol.