Go isn’t just old, it’s ancient, intimidating, and smarter than it looks. For decades, it stood as the Everest of board games, the one thing AI couldn’t conquer without looking like a confused intern at a philosophy lecture. That is, until Google's DeepMind came along with AlphaGo, a Frankenstein of neural nets, reinforcement learning, and sheer digital obsession.

In this episode, host Emily Laird rewinds to the moment when AI stopped being a party trick and started playing mind games, literally. We unpack how Go became AI’s final boss, why brute force wasn’t enough, and how AlphaGo flipped the script by teaching itself to win. Spoiler: it crushed a European champion like he was playing with oven mitts.

From ancient Chinese tea houses to the labs of Google DeepMind, this is the story of the game that broke the board and changed how we think about machines and intelligence forever.

Watch the AlphaGo Documentary

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