8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

[tromp]

> Go is a deeply complex strategic game — famously far more complicated than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible board configurations.

The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much, or to be exact [1]:

208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935

Indeed far larger than the ~ 4.8 x 10^44 legal chess positions [2], that is in between the number of legal 9x9 and 10x10 Go positions.

[1] https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html

[2] https://tromp.github.io/chess/chess.htm

[HackerThemAll]

All these digits are only making it more obfuscated. Using the order of magnitude it's 10^44 for chess versus 10^170 for Go. Thus, Go is 10^126 times more complex than chess.

For reference, the estimated number of individual atoms in the universe is thought to be between mere 10^80 and 10^83.

[bluecalm]

Complexity of the game has nothing to do with the number of legal positions. It's very easy to design a game with arbitrary number of positions which is very simple. While go might be more complex than chess using a more reasonable measure this argument was used to for arguing nonsense in scientific papers in the past (that some poker games are more complicated than chess because they have more possible states).

[lp4vn]

Go is played in a a bigger board though and has this kind of recursive nature where a subset of a go game is also a go game while chess is more ad-hoc.

[anon84873628]

For extra fun, use the "Listen to article" feature on that paragraph...

[bnprks]

To my knowledge AlphaGo models never became meaningfully available to the public, but 8 years later the KataGo project has open source, superhuman Go AI models freely available and under ongoing development [1]. The open source projects that developed in the wake of AlphaGo and AlphaZero are a huge success story in my mind.

I haven't played Go in a while, but I'm kind of excited to try going back to use the KataGo-based analysis/training tools that exist now.

[1]: https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

[alas44]

Google's documentary on AlphaGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

Truly a must watch! (just look at the video comments to be convinced)

[RetroTechie]

+1

What stuck with me is Lee Sedol's strong emotional reaction, leading him to leave professional Go playing.

It's understandable he didn't expect AlphaGo to be that strong. Or that (for him) losing to a machine took the 'soul' out of the game.

But come on... I've been cornered by Pac-Man ghosts many times. That doesn't make Pac-Man less fun to play.

Nor does losing to the crude 'AI' steering those ghosts. Instead, you play, aim for a high score, see how long you can survive, how many levels you can complete, or how many fruits & ghosts you can eat in a game.

And (if you care) compare how those 'metrics' stack up against other players.

If a machine with superhuman Go-playing ability isn't fun or challenging, then stick to human opponents.

Of course it's his views and choices, and I respect that. But other than providing extremely challenging opponent, I don't see how human-beating machine would take the fun out of a game. Rather the opposite: new tactics, new insights, a raised upper bound for a Go player's strength (human or otherwise), etc.

[Pet_Ant]

I know there are Go channels in Korea for watching professional matches... are there any for watching AIs face off against each other?

[apetresc]

Virtually every public Go server at the moment, unfortunately.

[mNovak]

Michael Redmond, to my knowledge the highest ranked English-speaking Go player, does youtube analyses of Go matches, including Pro vs AI games, which are very insightful.

[efrank3]

I can't believe it's been 8 years.

[rhaps0dy]

Great PR for Google from Lee! It totally isn't mostly for advancing Google's commercial interests, the bottom line being:

"I believe that humans can partner with AI and make great progress. As long as we can set clear principles and standards for it, I am quite optimistic about the future of AI technology in our daily lives."

I hope he got paid well.

[brainwad]

> Literally Everybody Not In The Bubble Of Working At Google

Trust me, Googlers would like our products to not suck, too.

[huytersd]

What dysfunctional products. I use atleast 7 Google products during my day and they all work really well and for free.

[ArtTimeInvestor]

    I thought it would be an easy victory

    I ... ended up only winning one out of our five games

It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over. And a few years later, no human can compete anymore.

I think we are in a similar situation in multiple professions today. For example with self-driving.

Musk recently said, that other car manufacturers are not much interested in talks about licensing FSD because they don't think it can work.

In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers anymore.

[svachalek]

> In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers anymore.

That's what they said 10 years ago. Sooner or later people will say it and be right, but the last few percent of any problem is a lot harder than people give it credit for. It may not be that hard to stay in a lane or write a little code, and that may look like it's doing most of the job, but those common tasks are just the easy part.

[lawn]

> It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over.

I think the interesting thing is how an expert in a field is wholly unprepared for predicting how the future will develop.

You mention what Musk has said about FSD and how it will completely take over in just ten years, but I feel compelled to point out that Musk has said that it's just right around the corner with only small challenges left, for many years.

I wouldn't place any faith in anything Musk says.

[jfengel]

At the time, I think everybody was unaware of this. Everybody followed the development of machine chess, but it was widely assumed that machine go was an entirely different category of difficulty. Chess engines gradually encroached on the very top grandmasters. AlphaGo came out of nowhere.

[SkyMarshal]

> It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over. And a few years later, no human can compete anymore.

Easy to see that in hindsight, but when the game was actually played it was earlier in the development of AI and less apparent how good it had become.

[hyperpape]

At the time, the only public results were demonstration games against a much weaker professional. The actual strength of the machine was only known privately within DeepMind.

[bongodongobob]

You do realize this was 8 years ago, and no Go engine came even close to what Alpha Go was able to do right? Afaik, there weren't even any competitive engines period. It basically came out of nowhere.

[dvh]

FSD will never work because it concentrates defendants into single juicy target.

When your neighbor Bob (who is still paying mortgage and his wife is battling cancer and who occasionally babysit your kids) ran over your cat, you don't sue him. But you would sue Tesla.

Mark my words, in 10 years ex-programmers will be throwing shelter cats under FSD cars just to earn a living.