In order to fully appreciate Greg Kohs’s documentary, it helps to have some understanding of the ancient Chinese board game Go, a strategic game played on a 19-by-19 line grid using black and white stones. Mastering the game is no mean feat for human players, but Kohs’s film follows an effort by the Google-owned DeepMind Company to create an artificial intelligence (AI) program called AlphaGo that will enable a computer to gain international dominance as a Go player. The challenges of translating Go’s complexity into an AI brain offers fascinating insights into the work of the computer programmers faced with this daunting task. Former European champion player Fan Hui is recruited in 2015 for a five-game tournament against the AlphaGo program and loses all of his matches, but a 2016 match in Seoul against South Korean champion Lee Sedol ended with AlphaGo winning four of five match-ups (Lee’s sole victory against the computer reaffirmed that AI technology was fallible). AlphaGo serves up a winning celebration of technological genius, although the game itself is not exactly cinematically compelling (fortunately, however, the editing mercifully speeds up the action here). Recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)
AlphaGo
(2017) 90 min. DVD: $95: high schools & public libraries; $295 w/PPR: colleges & universities (discussion guide included). DRA. Ro*co Films Educational. Closed captioned. Volume 33, Issue 5
AlphaGo
Star Ratings
As of March 2022, Video Librarian has changed from a four-star rating system to a five-star one. This change allows our reviewers to have a wider range of critical viewpoints, as well as to synchronize with Google’s rating structure. This change affects all reviews from March 2022 onwards. All reviews from before this period will still retain their original rating. Future film submissions will be considered our new 1-5 star criteria.
Order From Your Favorite Distributor Today: