Lee Sedol, born in 1983 in Jeollanam-do, South Korea, is a famous Korean Go player and the world's top Go player.
He joined the dan in 1995, became a third dan in 1999, and later won the "LG Cup" championship, rising straight to the ninth dan. He is "steady, accurate and ruthless" in chess, often grasping the weaknesses of his opponents in desperate situations, taking the initiative to attack, and turning defeat into victory. In 2016, he fought a human-machine battle with AlphaGo, a computer Go program developed by Google, and lost 1:4.
Lee Sedol was rebellious from an early age. When he was a child, he played missing because he was dissatisfied with the master's arrangement of his games in the game. As he grew up, he also often refused to compete. South Korea's dan ranking system is because of his reforms. According to the rules of the Korean dan ranking tournament, it is necessary to go through a professional dan ranking tournament before you can be promoted, but Lee Sedol refused to participate in the dan ranking tournament after winning the third dan, and he often crushed the nine-dan players as a three-dan competition, which was not conducive to the Korean dan ranking rules. Therefore, the Korean Chess Institute stipulated that players who won the world championship in the tournament could directly advance to the dan rank. In this way, Lee Sedol suddenly rose from three to nine stages.
In 2016, Lee Sedol's five battles with artificial intelligence Alpha Go attracted the attention of the world. Although Lee Sedol lost, this did not affect his status in the Go world.