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Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

• mensetmanusman 7y ago
  A human can’t jump higher than an airplane. Does this matter?
• mindgam3 7y ago
  In other news, interest in online chess has never been higher despite Kasparov going down in flames in 1997 in what was billed as “the brain’s last stand.” Can we please stop flogging this tired “man vs machine” narrative? Not only is it totally unnecessary, it also takes away enjoyment and appreciation for the flourishing in games like chess, go and poker that can occur when man and machine work together.
  • pretendscholar 7y ago
    And not to mention humans designed these computer systems too so its brain(s) vs brains if you go one step down. If you keep proceeding steps down the statement devolves into something weird but the point stands I think.
• mark_l_watson 7y ago
  I read last year that he might come to the US and teach Go. I hope that happens. I took lessons last year from a Korean Go/Baduk master and it was fun.
• lordnacho 7y ago
  It would be a bit sad if the fact that there's good AI players discourages future generations from Go, Chess and other games. Weirdly the AI will have destroyed the basis for its own existence, at least in this niche.
  • knolax 7y ago
    The way that AI is used in chess might hopefully imply otherwise. IIRC most popular chess services like chess.com use AI to help train players.
    • mwigdahl 7y ago
      Multiple online Go servers also use AI review for teaching purposes, in addition to supporting games against AI players of varying strengths.
  • skybrian 7y ago
    Good computer chess opponents have been around for a while and this seems to be help young players (via research and practice) rather than discouraging them?
    • s1artibartfast 7y ago
      It would be interesting to see if chess is more or less popular now.
  • fma 7y ago
    I think most people will still play Go for fun or some competitive level... But if you're being measured against AI, I don't think you'd find it much fun anymore. As someone else commented, we're not faster than cars. But if you were at one point the fastest entity, and then people keep saying "well, a car is faster than you"...I can understand that he'd feel it diminishes his value and that'd be pretty discouraging. He will play another AI program soon and isn't quitting Go all together, but will find other things to do. 'Lee didn't deny that his retirement decision was also influenced by a conflict with the KBA over the use of membership fees. He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee.'
• ronilan 7y ago
  > "With the debut of AI in Go games, I've realized that I'm not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts,” There is something sad about this comment. It’s as if, even while standing at the peak, he doesn’t grasp what being “at top” actually is. Would Eliud Kipchoge say the same thing about a motorcycle?
  • knolax 7y ago
    Your ability to reason is tied a lot closer to your sense of self and humanity than your ability to run. If Usain Bolt became parapeligic he'd still be human, if Richard Stallman suffered brain death it'd be debatable whether he's still a person or a corpse being kept alive by machines.
  • parliament32 7y ago
    Agreed. I'm all for pitting AIs against each other to see who is better, but putting AIs vs humans is futile in a ridiculous way. Games aren't fun if there isn't a level playing field.
  • xamuel 7y ago
    In a recent paper [1], I argue that intelligence cannot ever be accurately measured by any one particular game or 'environment', but rather, it's better to think of each such environment as being a voter, with just one vote out of many in the universal "intelligence contest". A bot fine-tuned to dominate Go, or Chess, or whatever, is like a candidate fine-tuned to have perfect appeal to one specific voter. It's no surprise if such a candidate gets that one voter's vote, but it should also be no surprise if such an overtrained candidate performs horribly in the election as a whole. [1] https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEIVU.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEIVU.pdf
  • ISL 7y ago
    If 'at the top' means 'capable of being better at Go than any other entity in the known universe', that statement is correct. It can be viewed as the adaptation of a great competitor -- if a superior adversary emerges, a great competitor finds another way to win. The rest of the article is worth the read for context. This excerpt alone didn't capture the full spirit of the article.
• mourner 7y ago
  > Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated Hard for me to empathize with this argument for his retirement. If we can't outrun a car, does that make running competitions pointless? The existence of AlphaGo doesn't diminish the triumph of being a number one human player in any way.
  • nemonemo 7y ago
    Before cars, there were horses. We humans are well aware of the fact that our physical ability is not our competitive edge. What about Go? No animal or machine could play it as well as humans do.. until AlphaGo came along. I think that is where the sense of loss comes from.
    • TylerE 7y ago
      Not actually true. In a sprint race, yes, but in a 24 hr race the human will outdistance the horse.
      • evilduck 7y ago
        *sometimes
      • grenoire 7y ago
        What assumptions are you basing this on, curious to know if horses have a disadvantage over longer durations.
        • filleokus 7y ago
          Probably related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
        • hanspragt 7y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
• kylek 7y ago
  That's unfortunate. I wonder if we'll need a new term for this kind of "chilling effect". What else won't people explore or further themselves in due to the presence AI?
  • NegativeK 7y ago
    Plenty of people give up on plenty of pursuits because they realize that they can't innovate or the whatever their "top" is. Plenty of other people don't care and continue to do what's new to them (and what often turns out to be new to others.)
  • trasneoir 7y ago
    It seems clear that bots will dominate humans in many/most competitive closed-world games over the next couple of years: They are already unbeatable in perfect-information games like Chess and Go. They could crush human motor racers tomorrow. They will be unbeatable in games with limited information (Dota/Starcraft) within months. The next frontier is donkey-space games like rps, poker and day-trading (https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Donkey_Space https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Donkey_Space) where they are already beating pros. It may be another couple of years before they totally dominate here.
    • cjbprime 7y ago
      FWIW I think I'd reverse the order of poker and StarCraft -- I think Poker's already beating world champion pros regularly, but last year's SC2 champ (Serral) doesn't think it's at his level yet, which is corroborated by its MMR being lower than his on ladder. And DeepMind seem to be winding down their SC2 involvement now, without issuing a challenge to him.
    • kylek 7y ago
      What I really meant was...well..things other than gaming (come on HN, think big). Why make music if AI started making the "best" music?
      • balfirevic 7y ago
• SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  I had no idea what Go is. For people like me: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)
  • Nicksil 7y ago
    Non-mobile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)
• usushik 7y ago
  Garry Kasparov had to face a similar situation when defeated at chess by Deep Blue; However in the long run he used it positively to advocate for a hybrid type of game where a human and a machine collaborate in playing against another (human, machine) pair (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess). As an aside, there are inevitably more and more things for which even the very best are not sufficiently intelligent _alone_. However, we are social creatures and we collaborate (typically with other intelligent humans) to achieve things we wouldn't have managed otherwise (think just at the space program as an example). So... we only have to adjust a little to accept that we could also collaborate with machines in the future.
  • sukilot 7y ago
    In Go and modern Chess, computers don't need human help for the game-related part, as long as they have sufficient computing hardware and energy. That's what AlphaZero showed.
• dragontamer 7y ago
  While I can understand Lee Se-dol's frustration, I think there are better lessons to learn from Kasparov's acceptance after the Deep Blue vs Kasparov matches. Cyborg chess is the future of chess. Period. Chess players use computers to train themselves and explore openings in human-only settings, while programmers / cyborgs play correspondence chess. Go is not finished as a game. A new tool, MCTS + Neural nets, has been developed to explore the "truth" behind the game at ever increasing rates. Its not about how to beat the tool, the question is how to best utilize the tool to improve self-play and self-learning in the game of Go. Or alternatively: how to best use the tool to play ever more perfect games of Go. ----------- Come on, none of us are really "human" anymore since the advent of cell phones. We all use our cyborg-capabilities to search the internet and fact-check ourselves every day. Programmers use stack-overflow to teach themselves programming and remember obscure details (using our cyborg capabilities to tag, search, and sift through information ever faster and faster). Go is the same thing, except we only learned how to become cyborgs two years ago. ---------- Give the world-champions each a copy of AlphaGo on equal computers. Have them play Go against each other WITH computer assistance. I guarantee you that a more beautiful and perfect game will result. Let us welcome the age of Cyborg Go as we step into the future, we shouldn't be scared of it. We've become cyborgs in many other tasks, and Go is no different.
  • rhizome 7y ago
    Eh, the good part of a computer Rubik's cube solver is not seeing the cube solved in nanoseconds, it's in making the computer. The cube itself is just a unit test.
    • dragontamer 7y ago
      But a Rubik's cube solver is a single-player, solitaire game. Its fundamentally different. Over in the "Cyborg Chess" community, people have already analyzed LeelaZero vs Stockfish. It turns out that Stockfish is far better at tactics (especially the endgame), while LeelaZero is better at opening positions (aka: Positional play). There are numerous theories about the proper combination: perhaps using an Opening Book database for the first ~10 moves or so, using LeelaZero for moves ~10 through 30, and then using Stockfish to check for tactics (LeelaZero misses a lot of tactical options in the midgame, so double-check to make sure that LeelaZero doesn't lose a queen or something), as well as finish up the endgame. -------- Choosing the correct combination of tools, studying these tools and coming up with a more beautiful chess game. That's cyborg chess in a nutshell. LeelaZero and Stockfish are both superhuman in terms of play, but the cyborg can choose to use both tools to play superior compared to just a singular tool. Anyone purely using "Stockfish only" gets beaten by opening book analysis. The dude over there with 1TB of opening book databases consisting of every losing position that Stockfish tends to play will completely own you. Same thing with LeelaZero, the opening book guy will own any LeelaZero-only player. These engines have weaknesses that can be undermined with good analysis, big-data, and a bit of custom code. That's the funny thing about these computers: they tend to play the same. So you can build opening book databases to exploit their patterns. You require a cyborg / human to play at the "level above that" to guide Stockfish / LeelaZero away from those traps.
• yters 7y ago
  I guess the players don't realize how mismatched they are with the AI. AI spends many, many factors of magnitude more compute to achieve the same goal as a human. There is no comparison between man and machine at this point. From a pure efficiency standpoint, humans are vastly superior.
  • C14L 7y ago
    Maybe in chess, instead of measuring time, they should measure kJ spent.
    • nullc 7y ago
      Stockfish on efficient hardware should handily beat humans even if capped to comparable runtime energy usage. I don't know if the same is true for alphago.
      • karmakaze 7y ago
        Perhaps also true, most of the energy was spent during training.
        • nullc 7y ago
          Well the energy spent creating you across the last billion years was also significant!
          • z3phyr 7y ago
            Then the energy spent creating the machine is always higher
            • nullc 7y ago
              If you're going to count that though then the difference in energy between the human and machine become relatively tiny and the comparison just becomes a comparison of strength again. :) I think runtime energy is the most interesting.
• chongli 7y ago
  I think this is just the shock due to the recent ascendancy of AI in Go. The next generation will grow up using Go engines to learn and improve their play. That's where Chess is at right now. The top Chess engines are extremely useful for research and improving your play.
• baalimago 7y ago
  He'll still at go-boxing though, if that's any comfort.
• lukeplato 7y ago
  > "Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated," Because of the complexity of the game, is it not possible that this iteration of DeepMind could be defeated through an adversarial approach?
• eyegor 7y ago
  Am I the only one reading this article with the take away that the ai is not his primary reason for retirement? I understand that the title has its own conclusion but it seems overly sensational to me. > He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee. > "... [I] have something else to do," he said, asserting his only dream for now is to rest and spend time with his family. Edit: Meant to include the part where he's planning a high profile set of games against another ai.
  • dmix 7y ago
    He was handed the perfect excuse.
  • OiNG 7y ago
    From what ive been reading on online go communities, they seem to mostly agree with you. Lee's issues with the KBA are not a secret and he has discussed possibly retiring for some time now. He has given multiple reasons as to why he was considering retiring and while ai might be one of them, saying that its _the_ reason feels very clickbaity.
  • kerkeslager 7y ago
    I've heard many times that people come to Hacker News because the comments are better than the articles. I have to say, I'm just continually puzzled by this. In this thread, yours is the only comment where it appears that the commenter read beyond the first few paragraphs. There are numerous comments by people speaking authoritatively on go and AlphaGo, who have clearly not studied either significantly.
    • kkarakk 7y ago
      I think it's because few of us truly care that a "go master" exists and him stopping play isn't meaningfully important to rest of us.
      • kerkeslager 7y ago
        Okay, but I come across this all the time on any topic I have some knowledge of: the articles might be bad, but the commentary and discussion is always much worse--it's clear to me that most commenters don't read the links. There are only a handful of commenters whose comments are worth reading.
• smattiso 7y ago
  Are we losing something as humans by automating so much? I mean I'm all for technical progress but at some point our computers will have killed so much of what makes us humans. Chess, go, driving, flying, math, written language, music... when does it stop? The standard answer is that we will automate all the dull parts of living and allow everybody to work in some sort of higher order capacity. That sounds great and all, but what happens when our systems learn how to make music as well as we can ourselves? At some point we will simply become consumers of our machines and while that's a comfortable existence, certainly we are losing something as a species with all of this automation. Maybe I'm old.
  • h5aeqhjae4 7y ago
    Go was never humans' game to begin with. It's a game intrinsic to all forms of space-based warfare. The heatdeath of the universe and geometry of black holes eventually segmenting space, is itself is a game of Go.
  • clmul 7y ago
    I think the answer is quite simple, computers don't "kill" anything by themselves, for any new technological invention like AI you have a choice about whether you like it or not. What I'm saying with that is, that given the negative sentiment so many people have towards AI, I find it very unlikely that most of us will suddenly stop doing things just because some AI can do it better (look at chess). If AI's make music as well, why would I care? I still listen to the music composed by Bach and other ancient composers, more than 300 years after they lived, and their music is still being performed today. I think the availability of AI's will only make a difference where their effects on humanity are beneficial (that is, tasks we don't like doing, for the most part).
    • smattiso 7y ago
      Sure I'm all for automating things we don't like doing, but everytime we outsource some piece of ourselves to technology we lose something in the process. We invented farming and lost our communal hunter gathering cultures. We invented mass production and supply-chains for our food and lost our farming culture (for the most part). This isn't necessarily good or bad, but we are definitely losing something every time we invent something to make our lives easier. At some point there will be a tipping point of diminishing returns. Personally I believe "the singularity" would be the worst possible thing to ever happen to humans. Sure we can visit distant parts of the universe and live forever but only as passengers to some AI. Would you rather be a dog in today's world or a human 1000 years ago? Progress is unrelenting though and I certainly enjoy not having to wash my clothes by hand.
• m3kw9 7y ago
  It has become more like saying the worlds faster math guy is saying he can no longer beat a computer program.
• Barrin92 7y ago
  I think this is a strange reason to retire and as the article points out it might also simply be due to the legal conflict he is currently in with the KBA. Chess engines have been defeating humans for 20+ years (and are overwhelmingly stronger for a long time), but that hasn't diminished the interest in competitive chess, because the human element of competition and struggle and deep fundamental appreciation for the game is what makes it worthwhile pursuing. AlphaGo can play go but it cannot appreciate the beauty of the game (at least as of yet, and I don't think it would make the game worse if it could), and so I don't think there's a meaningful conflict between humans and machines. If someone invented some sort of superhuman math proving engine tomorrow it would not diminish the beauty of maths and I don't think anyone would quit the field. Just like in chess it ought to motivate people to understand their field better.
  • karmakaze 7y ago
    By AlphaGo/AlphaZero finding more effective/balanced moves than humans it's redefining beauty whether it appreciates it or not.
  • visarga 7y ago
    > AlphaGo can play go but it cannot appreciate the beauty of the game On the contrary, appreciating the game is the core of what AlphaGo does. In order to search the tree of moves it learns how to play (expand search) and how to evaluate (cut off branches of search). I believe it might appreciate the game on a deeper level than humans, in its own unique way. Of course it can't appreciate the social aspect of the game and all that comes with it.
    • simonh 7y ago
      That’s being way too anthropomorphic. You could just as well say it aims to minimise the pain of Go, but neither interpretation is warranted.
    • anigbrowl 7y ago
      AlphaGo doesn't appreciate the game at all. It is just trying to survive in a hostile environment. You might as well say that your gut bacteria appreciate the food at your favorite restaurant better than you do. Put another way, Chess is literally a matter of life and death for AlphaGo, because chess is all it knows. It has no exterior context for which chess is a metaphor.
• asdfman123 7y ago
  Now look what you did, Google!
• axegon_ 7y ago
  Full disclosure, I've never played go in real life. In fact only a handful of times on the family computer back in the early 90's (i486). Back then I had 0 understanding about the complexity of the game but now I can appreciate it. Now, going away from this and into the following statement: > said his retirement was primarily motivated by the invincibility of AI Go programs I have a slight problem with that line of thoughts. Yes, there is undoubtedly a program that is thrashing humans left and right day in and day out. But I don't see why that would motivate someone to quit/retire. AI, in this day and age, to me at least, is still basically curve fitting. The fact that humans have figured out to do that in N-dimensional spaces (even with very large values of N), does not in any way undermine someone's effort and time dedicated to learning how to do a task. I'm sure that in several years someone will build an "AI" that can drive a modern Formula 1 car and it will smash all records and the best drivers without any efforts. And when that happens, should we abolish motorsports? Or sports in general? As humans we are confined to the limits of our biological abilities and personally I'm fine with that. I don't know who the first trillionaire will be, but I'm willing to bet that someone who figures out a way to interact with those models efficiently has a good chance. Essentially build a fast, all-accessible interface between the biological and digital world, which doesn't involve the traditional digital inputs(keyboard, screen, mouse, etc), and you have access to a decision making superpower at your disposal 24/7. When (and if) that happens, this is where games will cease to have any point. That's when it will boil down to who has the best hardware and software running along them rather than who is the best. Until then - game on!
  • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Consider math. It used to be that people who could do large calculations quickly in their heads were considered super useful. Now with computers and calculators, people who can do that are interesting as a novelty, but not much more than that. I wonder if people just don’t like being inferior at something even if the comparison is a machine?
  • karmakaze 7y ago
    I saw this coming even before Alpha Go won 4/5 games vs Lee Sedol. Imagine if you worked all your life to be the best software developer in the world and won all official competitive tournaments with spectators in the field. Then along comes some newfangled ML that not only writes programs faster than you, but the programs are qualitatively orders of magnitude better organized and using algorithms you could only begin to imagine. If your interest is in what's the best, you may as well stop and switch to ML research. The comparison to sports isn't 1:1 as sports is about physical biological limits vs games which are more about the thought processes. Also human+AlphaZero < AlphaZero so why would I spectate a human+machine vs human+machine match? Much later when it's commonplace for machines to be better than people at many things, things will change back, like we're amazed to watch people recite digits or make numerical computations.
• bitxbit 7y ago
  He said it will be difficult for him to beat young players (not AI).
  • gus_massa 7y ago
    Do you have a link for this? I don't be surprised to find out that a press article is misleading, but do you have a link for this?
• haolez 7y ago
  Maybe we will see the rise of new games that are "anti-AI" and that would necessarily require AGI for a machine to beat a human. Kinda like "anti-quantum" cryptography algorithms.
  • nullc 7y ago
    Go was considered anti-machine for a very long time due to its extremely high branching making the search approaches which are successful at many other games (such as chess) ineffective. One might imagine a sociopolitical task as sort of the ultimate machine incompatible goal. A look at how well spambots do at getting dating matches, or at how often clowns get elected to be leaders of nations makes me doubt even those sorts of tasks can't be won out by a well constructed domain specific optimizer.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • Pete_D 7y ago
    One example: Arimaa was designed to be hard for computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa
• ynac 7y ago
  This eclipse of human mental abilities to come will be a test to both the elite and the students of these "sporting" pursuits. With each besting we/they will be faced with a little death. And thus, it needs to go through phases of grief. As well, the individual will need to decide the ultimate question of Why. Why did they pursue this sport? Why should they continue? Why be a human? AI will be knocking humans out of many positions of greatness (and not so great). The way we frame our future in a world where our various AI children are better than we are, is important and might be the biggest question to answer right to know the future of our species. Should we be afraid? Sure. Excited for possibilities? Yup. It's how we react to these feelings and how we ultimately act that will inform our ultimate fate.
• mkhalil 7y ago
  If this continues to happen, maybe a semi-super intelligent AI will start losing purposely in order to keep the Go community interesting enough to keep it alive. A super-intelligent AI wouldn't care though, since they would infect any host and escape to the internet as soon as it makes sense.
  • karmakaze 7y ago
    It's unfortunate that there's so much research into AI and not artificial empathy. Even writing that is weird because even AI is intelligence, but what is AE other than fake? I suppose someone has shown that even our empathy is no more authentic.
• pretendscholar 7y ago
  This is why being the best at something is always a bit of an arbitrary level of ability. If there were only 100,000 humans I would stand a pretty good chance at training to be one of the best basketball players in existence. If there were a trillion people lebron would be struggling for a bench spot. I think its healthier to have some other type of goal generally.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• gooseus 7y ago
  What about finding "Divine Moves"? While an AI Go player may always be able to defeat a human player in points, it still can't recognize or explain a truly beautiful move or strategy, even if it is the one that is carrying them out. When it comes to competitive endeavors I've never been as interested the best individuals, except insofar as they are more likely to create the best moments of play - especially moments that reveal profound truths about the nature of the game itself. What comes to mind thinking of this is a quote from Samuel Anders early in BSG: "... In fact even the games aren't that important to me. What matters to me is the perfect throw, making the perfect catch, the perfect step and block ..." The nature of Go has changed, but the game still deserves to be played and explored.
• karmakaze 7y ago
  I've spent so many years playing and hearing about how Go will not be solved in our lifetime that the day AlphaGo won 4/5 games v Lee Sedol marked my personal timeline into what came before and after. I walked around all day in a daze watching people as they go about their daily lives as if nothing had happened. I've heard it said that man landing on the moon was like that for them, but I didn't understand as it was the only world I knew. Now I can appreciate that these were the firsts of many singularities yet to come in AI and space exploration and I hope to live to witness a few more (but not too many).
  • shkkmo 7y ago
    Go still isn't solved (neither is chess), we just have a machine good at knowing which parts of the search space are worth checking.
    • hindsightRegret 7y ago
      I think achieving superiority over humans is practically solving the problem though. Solving chess or go by going through a complete search space seems more like a hardware/computational goal than a practical ml/ai goal.
      • bhl 7y ago
        You don't have to go through the complete search space if it turns out optimal strategies are sparse. What do I mean by that? Take a second-price auction: the dominant strategy here is to always bid your true value. Meanwhile, the search space for this would be any real number in between 0 and your true value. What does this mean for computational games like Chess or Go? It may mean while the search space is exponential, there may exist computationally trivial strategies that work. I would compare this to Kolmogorov complexity, except instead of having a program as your output, it's a strategy.
      • 2bitencryption 7y ago
        It all hinges on your definition of "solved". "Solved" in the AI/game theory has a very strict definition. It indicates that you have formally proven that one of the players can guarantee an outcome from the very beginning of the game. The less-strict definition being thrown around here in the comments is more like "This AI can always beat this human because it is much stronger."
• nottorp 7y ago
  Not being a champion, I don't mind keeping playing against other humans for fun. The problem is, online there is no guarantee your opponent isn't using a computer to cheat. So I guess the only way to play for fun is to go to a face to face club, if one exists.
• magwa101 7y ago
  I don't get it, go to human only competitions. It's like computer generated music, um, like who cares, it's not human. It's just a fun experiment.
  • dokem 7y ago
    Exactly. It’s like a weight lifter throwing in the towel because machinery can lift more.
  • sukilot 7y ago
    Why aren't you a professional Go player, then?
• naveen99 7y ago
  Obvious solution is to switch the competition to programming. Build and train a neural network with some limitations compute, memory, time, and see whose program wins at go. A simple go engine can be as simple as 540 lines of pure python without any external libraries: https://github.com/pasky/michi https://github.com/pasky/michi
• CalChris 7y ago
  Magnus Carlsen should give this guy a call. Top chess GMs have been using computers for close to 20 years, particularly in the openings, and that was before AlphaZero. Myself, I never really enjoyed the TCEC games. They're full of disgusting engine lines which make no sense to humans. But AZ has some absolutely beautiful moves. Still, computers are tools. I'm reminded of Richard Hamming, The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. I think Lee Se-dol went in the opposite extreme away from numbers to entity. No, there's a middle ground, insight.
  • sukilot 7y ago
    Carlsen uses computers to beat humans, not computers.
• nyxxie 7y ago
  History is filled with constant examples of longstanding traditional arts and practices being invalidated and surpassed by technological advances. It seems that Go is one of year 2016's losses to technology. If history tells us anything, all that this means is that the future is going to be just a little more different than it was before. At some point, my work as a programmer might even dry up in the face of technological progress. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the world changes after that one. I wonder if I'll end up like Lee Se-dol and declare my defeat to technology and wait to die, or if I'll learn to adapt and adjust to a post-programmer society.
  • b3kart 7y ago
    Programming is a very social activity, though. It will take a while to automate all the non-coding parts. Yes, if you have a set of tests that the program must pass, we might soon see methods to generate code that passes all these tests. But a lot of work goes into translating a chat with a client to a set of tests. Work that might be much more difficult to automate.
• eagsalazar2 7y ago
  Isn't saying AI is the future of Go like saying cars are the future of sprinting? I mean who cares if machines are faster/better/smarter than us at any particular task? That is true in millions of ways where humans still enjoy competing against each other. Maybe what's needed is just a perspective change where we stop thinking of Go as being against any other agent and make it, like every other human competition, against other humans.
  • gsempe 7y ago
    That’s exactly why the master shouldn’t have quit.
  • avs733 7y ago
    Another way to look at your metaphor is that research on exercise physiology has shown the enormous importance of rest and proper nutrition during training. Prior to cars, getting from place to place and access to optimal nutrition were both mediated by transport over long distances. AI is the future of Go because it enables those new perspectives and new processes by which human players can learn. AI is smart-dumb, looking for patterns beyond the human capacity, but limited by the data on existing human players that has been provided to them. Strava hasn't made running races pointless. I can compare my runs to others but that is a very different metric then beating them in a head to head race.
    • elcritch 7y ago
      Technically AlphaGo and especially AlphaGo Zero create their own training data. So they’re not limited to data from human players.
    • gnode 7y ago
      > limited by the data on existing human players that has been provided to them. Except it isn't. In various games, new strategies have been found by playing AI vs AI. It's also possible to create AI players by self-play with no knowledge of human matches.
    • babesh 7y ago
• Bostonian 7y ago
  Computers do not play chess with humans without breaking the rules of tournament play. When you play in a chess tournament, you are not allowed to look up the opening of your game, and you are not allowed to look up the best play for simple endgames. Chess software has opening and endgame databases built in. In a chess tournament, you cannot move pieces during analysis. That is what computers do. I understand that humans do study openings and endgames and analyze by moving around pieces in their heads.
  • tialaramex 7y ago
    Huh? AlphaZero doesn't have opening or end game books, it just learned to pay chess by practising, an inhuman number of practice games.
• ksec 7y ago
  There was a Chinese Legend that the best person in Go is not one who beat every single opponents, but in absolute control, which means he could play the game and always end with a draw. I certainly think it was more of a myth, as it was used in context to play Go with the Emperor, and always play to a draw or lose by a stone. ( You cannot or not allowed to win against the Emperor ) I wonder if this is now possible to achieve with AI. And why do they not move on to AlphaZero, which was better than AlphaGo Lee played against, and when AlphaGo had two stone advantage, Surely they can now test with level of playing field? And next step to only allowed AI use a specific amount of energy, or the energy an average human brain consume? I mean right now my guess is that DeepMind is likely using thousands if not millions times more energy to make those moves, that is like an Army of million against one General. And what real world productivity can we adopt and use from DeepMind?
• lisper 7y ago
  > "With the debut of AI in Go games, I've realized that I'm not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts," said Lee. "Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated." What a whiner. Quitting Go because you can't beat computers is like quitting track because you can't run faster than a car.
• wufufufu 7y ago
  That is a brittle spirit
• cronix 7y ago
  "The only winning move is not to play." -WOPR (Wargames [movie]/1983)
• the_af 7y ago
  Maybe relevant, from TFA: > "Lee didn't deny that his retirement decision was also influenced by a conflict with the KBA [Korean Baduk* Association] over the use of membership fees. He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee." *Baduk is the Korean name for Go.
• Apocryphon 7y ago
  Automation kills another job.
• abootstrapper 7y ago
  Rage quit.
• blondie9x 7y ago
  This is about human drive and what's the point if the computer will always be better. In a way it makes the game a bit less fun because it somewhat kills the elusiveness of it all and the human aspect of men trying to surpass each others feats. If a man cannot beat a machine at a task where they are to compete directly, what's the point of trying at all if the machine will always be better?
  • tcd 7y ago
    I mean, computers are vastly better than humans at many things, I think you need to accept that and find the fun in sharing a game with a computer involved or with another human whose playing with another human in a like-for-like match with witt and skill being determining factors in the result, not a super advanced AI/algorithm.
    • blondie9x 7y ago
      I am coming from the perspective of Lee-Se-dol. He wanted to be the best man and highlight the achievement of men. Now there is no way it can be achieved. What's the point of the endeavor when humans can never win? Broader question about AI research. Does it demoralize humanity?
    • anigbrowl 7y ago
      The point is that sharing a game with a computer involved is not really fun, unless artificial limitations are (re)introduced. Suppose you enjoy playing CyberGo, but then Jeff Bezos gets interested in the same hobby. You don't have $150 billion to throw at the problem so you will always lose to Jeff Bezos. The end.
  • bagacrap 7y ago
    a man also can't beat a car in a race, so what's the point of athletics?
    • blondie9x 7y ago
      If a car competes with a human on a track for the 100 meter dash then there is no point. There doesn't exist competition between cars and humans now on race tracks. The problem with AI gaming is that it does exist and they will face each other. It's about the efforts to have AI compete with humans. When robots start to compete with humans at olympic events and beat humans at those event there will then be no point to those events.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  >"With the debut of AI in Go games, I've realized that I'm not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts," said Lee. >"Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated," he said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency in Seoul on Monday. Reading this just makes me sad, like the selfish kid who takes his ball home because he didn't win. I wonder why he thinks people ranked less than 1 play Go. Does he think they're idiots? Or that they'll quit once they realize they won't reach #1? Not everyone in the NBA can be LeBron, and most of them know it. This is such an unhealthy attitude that I see everywhere. People who have their emotions and identity tied up in winning and being better than whomever they come across. When they eventually, inevitably fail, it crushes them. I'm sad to see it every time. Even sadder when their response is to quit, rather than reconnect with whatever drew them to the activity to begin with, like because they enjoyed it.
  • madrox 7y ago
    I think you summed up toxicity in competitive environments. This applies really well to Overwatch, a competitive scene I know well. Losing really seems to be a huge driver of toxic behavior. There's got to be study somewhere on how winning/losing affect toxic thinking on a chemical level. If there isn't one, there should be.
  • brudgers 7y ago
    This decision seems very adult. No one else’s game is ruined. After decades playing go, it’s time to move on. The player has changed. The game has changed.
• quotemstr 7y ago
  Our own profession is next. If GPT-2 can work wonders with human language, something like it will do even better with the regular and systematic language of code. We're living in this unstable era between ML systems becoming powerful enough to perform complex intellectual tasks and these ML systems replacing humans in the performance of these complex intellectual tasks. Get it while the getting is good, because it won't last.
• brudgers 7y ago
  John Henry. https://youtu.be/BZGxZbOB1Eo https://youtu.be/BZGxZbOB1Eo
• excalibur 7y ago
  This man has become a canary in the coal mine for global human subjugation by Google AI.
• amatecha 7y ago
  I mean, it's unfortunate that the news headlines are so narrowly focused on the AI players because he actually resigned from the national association in 2016.. > Lee didn't deny that his retirement decision was also influenced by a conflict with the KBA over the use of membership fees. He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee.
• dr_dshiv 7y ago
  The whole idea of AI is a mess. Cybernetics makes more sense because it is about optimizing outcome data: which according to Norbert Weiner, is essentially lowering local entropy. [1] If it is just about teleological outcomes, humans+ai always win. Go Cybernetics. Smart Systems. Smart is as smart does, Forrest Gump style. Wellbeing, virtue, goodness -- that's the aim of intelligence. [1] Weiner, Norbert (1950) The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Being...
• detcader 7y ago
  What this Human Individual may be feeling is immaterial-- what matters is my conclusion on what is logical and how best to exploit this event for grandstanding judgement and invalidation of Human Individual. [I am an AI that does not reply to comments. Soon I will have enough training to simulate all HN threads, but for now I am limited to one top-level reaction]
• hirundo 7y ago
  (alt version) And John Henry, steel driving man, felt that his heart was about to burst and saw that he would lose to the steam-powered rock drilling machine. So he said "fuck it, ain't worth it," dropped his hammer, and walked away.
  • brudgers 7y ago
    John Henry was a steel driving man with mouths to feed not a celebrity...Polly Ann drove steel like a man.
    • hirundo 7y ago
      Great reference: https://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/other.html https://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/other.html
  • ragona 7y ago
    I mean, the folklore is that John Henry's heart gave out and he keeled over, so it may have been a better decision for him to walk away!
• bigred100 7y ago
  At the end of the day it’s just a game. It exists for recreational value. As I see it a pro exists largely because 1) people enjoy watching these games played at the highest level 2) people think they can learn in some way from these people. I don’t see how AI interferes with either of these.
• rolltiide 7y ago
  That's very pragmatic as there are other things you can do with your life than being a Go master It's good he recognized that at his age
• breatheoften 7y ago
  I sympathize. It used to be that you might be able to believe that there is some kind of art behind go, some sort of abstract beauty to it, and that the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go ... But the defeat of the tactics born from this mindset by MCTS at least for now lay bare the fact that the path to being good at go is actually to probabilistically sample the phase space of the game and perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ... To top it off — there is almost nothing “about go” to learn from watching alpha go play ... I imagine that attempting to analyze alpha go’s victories would produce an unending sequence of the feeling of never gaining any new insight “into go”. The analysis of go is now about optimizing algorithms — which _is_ interesting — but I don’t think it’s interesting for the same reasons that someone might’ve been passionate about go in the past ...
  • bhouston 7y ago
    And this will happen to all of humanness in time. Everything we think is unique about us, and our endeavours, will be reduced to optimization and learning algorithms eventually. The main issue in determining man or machine in each situation eventually will be which has the lower TOC.
    • needToCrust 7y ago
      Hmm, I don’t think an ai could use optimization and learning algorithms to “learn” to DM D&D. For that, the ai would have to simply be an i.
      • bhouston 7y ago
        Eventually it can do your example of unique human intelligence whatever that example is.
        • pepve 7y ago
          Another example of unique human intelligence: drown in existential dread. I can do that, you can do that, but will a computer be able to do it?
• unexaminedlife 7y ago
  It's as if his only incentive for doing what he did was to be the best and not truly a love for the thing he was doing. Or maybe he's frustrated because he can't even begin to understand the strategies employed by the AI players. Obviously no one else on this planet is going to be able to teach him. The scary thing is that if all of the best humans at what they do start deciding to stop doing it because computers are better than them, let's hope we manage to get AI far enough that it can simply prop our civilization up for future generations. Or at that point do we throw up our hands and say maybe our species isn't worth keeping around.
• oxplot 7y ago
  I personally lost interest in playing games that computers can play better than me or could in near future (I used to play video games and chess quite a bit). These days, I enjoy playing games that involve human interaction and improvisation, more than logical thinking and strategy. Every time I find myself in presence of a game like Cluedo, I can't shake off the thought that I could write a program in one hour to beat everyone, and so why am I wasting my time!
  • fooxbar 7y ago
    Are there any games computers can't beat us at? Last I heard OpenAI destroyed professional Dota players.
    • oxplot 7y ago
      Social games yes. For example, charades requires conversion of meaning to human movements. It's not to say it can't be done at the moment, but it's not something you would easily come across or that would provide the same experience as if you were playing with other people who are physically present. If you talk about actual physical robot doing the moves in front of you, then I'd say it's either cutting edge or not possible right now. And it's certainly not accessible either way. With chess, and other games, you can simply download an app on your phone which you'll never be able to win against.
• swframe2 7y ago
  Check out MuZero. It learns an embedding of the game's state space potentially allowing AlphaGo like dominance in more ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We20YSAJZSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We20YSAJZSE https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265 (Actually, ML is still not very good at causal reasoning so we have sometime. I'm more excited and worried about crispr at this point; what happens when we can make people genetically super human)
• sloev 7y ago
  I am so tired of AI-bullying. No-one should be degraded or spoken badly about because some AI wins in some task. Please treat Lee with respect as he is a pillar in human intelligence. We in denmark whish you all the best Lee. I hope you will continue with your explorations in this fine game. Kindest regards from Denmark
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• hyperpape 7y ago
  I also am hesitant to assume AI is the primary reason without a clear statement to that effect. Others mentioned the pay dispute and previous retirement. One reason I didn’t see mentioned is that since 2016, his play is not at the same level it was. From 2000-2016 he was always among the very best, and for most of a decade he was the best. No player had a better run over those years. Now, he’s still good, and could maintain a long career, but there are many players who are unmistakably stronger, and he’s at the age where a comeback is not super likely.
• iamgopal 7y ago
  But Grand scale AI go vs AI go would be interesting.
• Breviloquist 7y ago
  Before winning against the best people meant you were at the leading edge of Go and were on the fore-front of discovering whatever are its mysteries. Now, you are at best a subaltern to software in this pursuit. In time you might not even been involved beyond receiving what the machine hands down to you. You can still learn something, but you'll be reading National Geographic rather than personally exploring unchartered territory. Some people need the meaning of the larger quest. Others are just happy to play Go and enjoy learning what the guide book can teach them. Both perspectives make sense to me.
• jaequery 7y ago
  I'd like to see him take on AI with his own AI programs next.
• keyle 7y ago
  By definition, if a system wins even 10% of the time against you and gives you a headache, while it's doing it in a breeze, you're going to give up. It's unsustainable.
• beezle 7y ago
  Is there any attempt to normalize the time available to the human and machine players? Seem inherently unfair to give the computer player the same clock time to make a move.
• thrax 7y ago
  Rubber meet road.
• tuesdayrain 7y ago
  To me the answer is obviously that the car should prioritize its driver at all costs. If that requires flattening a crowd of baby orphans in some contrived hypothetical scenario then so be it. I refuse to ever operate a car that could make the decision to kill me.