Finding out about someone’s retirement has always made me happy. Happy for them, and happy for their families.

I believe that everyone who’s worked a long time deserves to stop one day. So, when that time arrives, I genuinely wish my colleagues the best of times with their loved ones and with themselves.

But, I was crushed when I read last week that Lee Sedol, the 18 times Go champion and one of the most intelligent people in the world, announced that he would retire.

“With the debut of AI in Go games, I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts,” said Lee Sedol as reported by Jennings Brown at Gizmodo.

I don’t know Lee Sedol, personally. I’ve never shared the same space with him. But I did follow his career, especially the games he played three years ago against DeepMind’s AlphaGo. And I got to like him, if one could like someone one has never met. Deep inside me, I thought that one day I would take my daughter to travel to the other side of the world to watch one of his games. And perhaps shake his hand.

March 15, 2016, was the day when AI made history. That was the day when Lee Sedol lost the fifth and final game vs. the artificial intelligence system, called AlphaGo. A team of skillful AI researchers had designed this system at DeepMind, a UK lab owned by Google.

Sedol and AlphaGo played five games against each other. Alpha Go won 4 of them. It was the first time a machine had defeated the very best at this enormously complex game.

Go is much more complicated than Chess. No software engineer can write the code to solve for all the probabilities in this game. There are too many scenarios — more than the number of atoms in the universe.

But DeepMind didn’t need to program every scenario; DeepMind used machine learning.

A documentary film, called ALPHAGO, brilliantly captured the research behind it, and the highlights of the match. I highly recommend this film to anyone interested in artificial intelligence.

A few moments throughout the games perplexed people, people who understood Go, and the nuances of it.

I will never forget when, in the second game of this match, AlphaGo made a move, Move 37, which halted the game for a bit. Lee Sedol and everyone else scratched their heads. They couldn’t understand why the AI made this move; they couldn’t make sense of it.

Everyone who knew anything about Go thought it was the strangest choice that the machine made. Lee Sedol took a break for fifteen minutes, smoked a cigarette before coming back, and continued the game.

Lee Sedol would later lose that game.

At the press conference, Lee Sedol said that he was speechless, especially surprised about Move 37.

The DeepMind team seemed puzzled, too. Later they analyzed this move and found out that almost no human player would ever make that move. AlphaGo calculated a 1 out of 10,000 possibility for anyone to make such a move. But it made it and won the game with it.

It turns out move 37 was a moment of genius.

“This move demonstrated the enormously powerful and mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence.” would later write Cade Metz at Wired.

After the match was over, Lee Sedol apologized from his watchers. It was clear that AI took him by surprise, and he felt personally responsible for letting people down.

“I don’t know how to start or what to say today, but I think I would have to express my apologies first. I should have shown a better result, a better outcome, and better content in terms of the game played, and I do apologize for not being able to satisfy a lot of people’s expectations. I kind of felt powerless.” said Lee Sedol.

I can only imagine what an emotional roller coaster it must have been for Sedol since 2016. But I wished he hadn’t given up that fast. I’d much rather have seen if he’d fought. He could even work with DeepMind and demonstrate that human + AI is better than any AI. That’s what I was hoping for.

Not because that was what Kasparov did after his defeat to IBM’s Deep Blue. I wished that the entire world, our next generations, could learn from this humble man. Lee Sedol, symbolized for me the silent power, and the amazing grit of someone so passionate about his craft.

That’s what makes me sad, because my daughter will never watch him play. And it breaks my heart to think that he’ll be remembered as the last grand Go champion to be defeated by artificial intelligence.

But again, it’s a personal choice.

Regardless, I respect Lee Sedol. And will always remember his brilliance, his grit, his passion and the humbleness that he portrayed during those incredibly challenging games. 

And even if he ends up never coming back to Go? Well, so be it.

All the best to you, Lee Sedol! You inspired millions that you’ve never met. Enjoy your retirement, my friend!

You deserved it! Thank you!