Minotaur, who was called AlphaGo
Lee Sedol wins against AlphaGo on the fourth match
After he ascended the throne of the island of Crete, King Minos competed with his brothers to rule. Minos prayed to Poseidon, the sea god, to send him a snow-white bull as a sign of support. He was to kill the bull to show honor to the deity, but decided to keep it instead. To punish Minos, Poseidon made Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife, fall deeply in love with the bull. The offspring was the monstrous Minotaur, a creature shaped partly like a man and partly like a bull who ate human flesh.
King Minos commanded Daedalus, a great architect and inventor, to build a place for Minotaur so intricate that anybody could enter but nobody would find their way back. This is when Daedalus build the Labyrinth.
Every year Athenians, who were oppressed by Minos, send seven young men and seven maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur. Once inside, one would go endlessly along its twisting paths without ever finding the exit. To this place the young Athenians were each time taken and left to the Minotaur. There was no possible way to escape. In whatever direction they ran, they might be running straight to the monster; if they stood still, he might at any moment emerge from the maze.
When the third sacrifice approached, Theseus vowed to slay the monster. But even if he succeeded, how would he find his way back from the depths of the Labyrinth? Minos’s daughter Ariadne, who fell in love with Theseus, gave him a ball of thread. As he entered the Labyrinth, Theseus fastened it to the door and let it trail behind him as he went in. He came across the Minotaur in the furthest section of the labyrinth, killed him with a sword of his father, and then made his way out again by pulling himself along the thread.
George Frederic Watts. The Minotaur (1885). Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Only for the briefest time in history, a man could claim to be the center of the Universe. The long-time servant of the whims of Nature, he is soon to become the servant of the Machine. Lee Sedol is not there as a master celebrating yet another grand achievement of humankind. Rather, just like in the ancient tales, we are already subdued by the machine, and he is that hero who might still sometimes outwit the superhumanly strong but dumb (single-track) machine. But as the Labyrinth is growing, it will not matter who actually lives inside it, for not even heroes will have the ability to make their way out.
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