11 ms·

Impact of Go AI on the professional Go world

161 points by apetresc 6y ago

iandanforth 6y ago
I love the idea of tea ceremony before a lesson. I'd hate for that culture to be lost entirely. Ironically, the AI-Explainability problem is, at least for now, an asset. The model can't explain its strategy, only that it judges some positions stronger than others based on a huge amount of experience. That reduction of aggregate experience to comprehensible language is still (mostly) in the realm of humans and so should provide a bridge for talented, insightful teachers to teach the next generation.
- YetAnotherNick 6y ago
  Top chess engines are atleast 700-800 points above top human. Engines have been absolutely unbeatable for humans for 10 years. Still I don't see the culture lost. In fact, it is easier for anyone to see mistakes after every match in less than a minute and you don't need a coach to point it for you.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    Seeing mistakes after the fact is one thing. Developing the thought process you need to see the mistakes during the game is a whole different thing, and that's where a coach helps. Also a computer won't tell you its plan and why it chose it.
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      The computer makes the tactical blunders very clear. For strategic/positional issues, it is not nearly as good a teacher.
- prerok 6y ago
  I like this train of thought. It's actually the same as Douglas Adams'. Now we know the answer is 42 and now we need to solve what the question really was :) I think it's ironic how he foresaw the problem we are experiencing with AI right now.
- Buttons840 6y ago
  I wonder how often human players invent explanations for what is really just a gut instinct?
  - faceplanted 6y ago
    I wonder if there's actually any kind of line between "inventing explanations" and actually theorising and studying the game's mechanics. Obviously it's mostly pattern recognition, but that pattern recognition is partitioning parts of the board into classifications of what those sections are doing and whether to prioritise them or let it go in favour of something else, the immediate decisions within those sections are fairly logical. The more complex broader pattern recognition is how those sections will interact as they approach each other, which if there is that much inventing explanations where I imagine it comes in.
yakcyll 6y ago
Along with a response from Antti Törmänen 1p, a Finnish professional: https://www.nordicgodojo.eu/post/276/impact-of-go-ai-on-the-professional-go-world-response https://www.nordicgodojo.eu/post/276/impact-of-go-ai-on-the-...
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  Thanks for posting that. The example about a very strong Go AI opening with the black hole opening. I am a double digit kyu player, but I enjoyed clicking through the most recent game with it: http://www.yss-aya.com/cgos/viewer.cgi?19x19/SGF/2020/08/21/713326.sgf http://www.yss-aya.com/cgos/viewer.cgi?19x19/SGF/2020/08/21/... The battle in the upper left was fascinating!
- morelisp 6y ago
  I think this might hit on the key as to why demand for teaching is dropping even though AIs don't really replace good teaching: > Lee seems to combine these two with the silent assumption that the professionals’ goal is to strive for the ‘highest possible level of go’, which is no longer possible because the ai cannot be beat; incidentally, Lee Sedol remarked something similar when he announced his retirement. To me, on the other hand, it seems like nothing has changed because I have always reached for the ‘highest possible personal level of go’, and this should be the same for most players who are not near the top of the world. Perhaps it has less to do with being at "the top of the world" and more to do with the role of the game in the broader culture. If what attracts you is not just your personal drive to improve, but the sense of overall societal contribution, that will surely wane if training goes towards study of AI rather than active research in play. On the other hand in the US/Europe such a thing hardly exists at all even for professional players. Maybe a comparison point: What happened to voice and instrument lessons once recorded music became commonplace? In the fairly recent past any social group that wanted to listen to decent music must have had a member who was at least a slightly-above-average musician; and once they didn't need that anymore, that skill may have significantly dropped in social standing. That doesn't mean no one takes lessons anymore, but it seems like the number would have greatly reduced. (On the other hand, the median interest level and drive among people taking lessons probably increased.) (Does that mean the go world is going to have to find its equivalent of Kurt Cobain to get lessons started again?)
nopinsight 6y ago
The article is an interesting discussion by a Go insider in Korea. Regarding the impact on pro-level teaching: “The demand for pro-level teaching games and private lessons has plummeted. Professional players used to command a high price for teaching games and lessons, and this has been a critical source of income for many pros.” I think the community would also be interested in articles which discuss the impact of AI on professionals in other fields, obviously chess, but also more distant ones such as e-sports and language translation. —— On language, I would guess that the demand for non-certified translation might plummet between many major languages and English since automatic translation of documents is now quite close to human level when there is sufficient training data. Down the line, might this reduce the demand for advanced foreign language skills and thus change the career paths of language majors as well?
- maletor 6y ago
  This is interesting and doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't learn good form just by playing a good opponent.
  - comboy 6y ago
    I think you can. Especially when you can browse the tree which is similar to asking your teacher "what if" questions. Many players I know learned how to play pretty well on 9x9 by playing a computer program. I'd argue you can even learn much faster playing a program, because for high level players many sequences were based purely on memorization (including point values) but now seeing different results quickly you can understand it better. And the level where your play is based on high level abstractions like influence and group strength is not that hard to reach and it wouldn't take much to reason them out just from the games.
    - Trombone12 6y ago
      I think the proper statement is that it's possible, but not efficient. Learning go from a go-program seems much like learning assembly from gcc.
_acco 6y ago
If you haven't seen it, the documentary on DeepMind's AlphaGo is very well done. The climax revolves around the AI expressing what we humans call "creativity" in a match against decorated player Lee Sedol. Watching Lee Sedol's reaction is deeply moving. Free to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y
- JRKrause 6y ago
  This comment, that AlphaGo showed "creativity", seems so ridiculous to me. Alphago is operating purely on bayesian statistics (with very good priors) so it's decisions are exactly the opposite of creativity.
  - _acco 6y ago
    It's an invitation to define (or re-define) creativity, my friend :) If it seems ridiculous to you, that's a good signal that you'd get a lot out of digging into philosophy of mind. Where do our thoughts come from? Creativity? Is it so preposterous that these too arise from probabilistic electrical storms - but in wet matter as opposed to hard? Where thoughts come from may be too complex for us to model now, maybe ever. But if you look deep enough, I think you'll find at heart deterministic processes driven by networks that were trained through nature + nurture. Maybe creativity is less ethereal than we perceive. Maybe it would benefit us to start considering how non-sentient intelligence can achieve it.
    - JRKrause 6y ago
      I am not making, and do not explicitly agree with, the statement that only human brains are imbued with 'creativity'. However, the core of the alphaGo algorithm is just a monte-carlo tree search of the game initially populated with prior estimates of the value of each game state(with the generation of the prior value estimates being carried out by the DNN). I see no space in this simplistic statistical game analysis for concepts such as creativity. The move in question was chosen because it's prior value estimate by alphaGo was favorable and upon further analysis was concluded to be the most likely to result in a game victory relative to all other available moves. If alphaGo was only trained on human matches and subsequently was able to discover moves that drastically deviate from typical human strategies, I would be more open to labeling it as creative. However, most of alphaGo's training is carried out against itself, it's entirely possible that alphaGo has made this particular(or similar) move many times against itself during training.
hcnews 6y ago
Chess went through a similar transition in the last 10-20 years when computers became much stronger than the best human. Some of her points are valid, some of them are temporary. 1. Professional gameplay changes a lot. There are no more secret openings/midgames/endgames, you will hardly be able to cheese a top pro (not that it was easy before). Professional gameplay requires memorizing tons of lines and then adding on to add it. There are many chess openings which require memorization till the end result (50 moves) or you risk losing the game. We are going to see a similar trend of memorization in Go. 2. Online casual gameplay changes a lot. There are lot of cheaters in online forums. Cheat detection has to be built in to the sites or you risk being taken over by cheaters. Easy availability to best moves allows the dedicated player to learn a lot faster than previously where there was a discoverability issue. We see this in the professional chess world where its not uncommon to see 14-16 yr old GMs nowadays. 3. Professional teaching still survives. Engine can tell you the best move but it doesn't give you a teaching path from beginner to amateur professional to grand master. I am not a master but based on anecdotal evidence people still employ coaches but for much more focussed tasks and more specialized skills (e.g. openings, midgames, endgames).
- benchaney 6y ago
  I disagree about memorization. That may be true for chess, but the go board is too large and the game to long for that to be viable. In the opening, bots will generally recommend several places per move that lose 0 or -0.1 points compared to its preferred move. You would have to memorize thousands of opening just to have a chance of still being in book for the entire opening, and even then your opponent can take your out of your preparations at a cost of less than 1 point.
  - __s 6y ago
    To add to your point, Fischer was complaining about chess openings going stale 20 years before computers came on the scene
    - jmcgough 6y ago
      After he fell out of the pro scene he became way more interested in chess variants than vanilla chess (more specifically his Fischer Random Chess). I can't imagine being at the level he was at, where you needed to hundreds or thousands of hours memorizing and practicing openings... so not surprised he appreciated a game that valued more on-the-fly decision making than heavy preparation.
joerickard 6y ago
A friend put out a related post that I found enjoyable. It has some good background information. https://brantondemoss.com/writing/kata/ https://brantondemoss.com/writing/kata/
umvi 6y ago
Slight tangent, but the barrier of entry to play Go is quite high. I've been learning over the past few months and it's very frustrating. My biggest complaint is that the jargon is just out of control. For whatever reason, instead of localizing go jargon like the chess community has done, the Go community just uses native japanese terms for everything. This makes it super confusing as a beginner and you basically have to have the wiki[0] open all the time if you have any hope of understanding what people are saying. For example, when reading a beginner's article: "In this case you can't move here because of ko, so you would instead look for other pieces that are atari or close to atari - just be careful of seki" Would a bit of localization killed the go community? "In this case you can't move here because of the repetition rule, so you would instead look for other groups of pieces that can be captured or are close to being captured - just be careful not to get in a capture-stalemate scenario" My second biggest complaint is that scoring is not straightforward at all and there are 2 rule sets (Chinese, Japanese). Which ruleset should I use? Are there any subtle strategy changes you need to make when switching between rulesets? When playing I have no idea who is currently winning if it looks close (i.e. roughly equal white/black areas) and I basically just wait for the computer to announce the winner at the end. Anyway, just venting about my frustrations learning Go. Chess, by comparison, was much easier to learn. I didn't feel swamped with jargon and it was much easier for me to grasp which side was winning (though occasionally good chess players can pull a checkmate out of a seeming disadvantaged situation that I didn't see coming!) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms
- lacker 6y ago
  The English-speaking Go community is just many times smaller than the English-speaking chess community. Many of the best books for Go are translated versions of foreign ones, there aren’t many popular streamers to learn from, all sort of educational material is not there because the market isn’t there.
- comboy 6y ago
  Biggest community is in Asia. When you visit tournaments common language for what's happening on the board is really nice to have. If you stick around that's like <0.01% of what you need to learn anyway. Plus you've learned where Atari name came from :) Japanese counting is more popular but you really don't need to worry about it until some high dan level if you play on 19x19. It takes a long, long time before you will be able to say confidently who is winning on 19x19 if the game is close. I suck at Chess, but to me Go was much easier to learn. You can have quite a lot of fun without studying any openings.
suyash 6y ago
This is one of the unfortunately reality of advances in technology specially AI. It started with games like Chess and Go, wait and watch as AI will eat into other creative human endeavors - both logical like accounting, programming and creative like art, music etc. How humans will deal with watching AI get better and better than us in many areas will be interesting to see.
- makapuf 6y ago
  The thing is games are relatively innocuous but then when it works well you'll see ai applied to higher stakes decision: why not trading by example? Is AI trading a thing? Does it provide an advantage yet? And what is the impact on trading when all of it is automated?
  - naveen99 6y ago
    Trading is harder because people start with different amounts of capital and different risk tolerance. The more capital you have the more illiquid the market becomes and less predictable.
    - SamBam 6y ago
      Capital and risk level seem to me something that AIs would be extremely good at adjusting for -- more so that humans, who will bring irrational thoughts into it.
  - suyash 6y ago
    trading was one of the first ones to be disrupted - algorithmic treating was using old school AI, I'm sure Deep Learning is being used now a days.
hoytech 6y ago
I'm told that in the 70s, when backgammon players had a dispute about the correctness of a move (usually a double), they would agree to continually setup the board from that position and play game after game, until somebody capitulates (or runs out of money). Nowadays we just make a side-bet about what XG mobile will think about the move.
Cd00d 6y ago
Lol. This a pointless comment to the people interested, but I'm so amused with my stupidity I had to share. I opened this thread with absolutely no thought about the _game_ Go, and read the top comment about how chess changed in the last 10-20 years thinking it was tangentially related because of Watson and whatnot playing AI chess. I came here thinking I was going to read comments about how the Go language has been impacted with the introduction of ML and AI packages that attract data science types from Python and R. I thought it would be interesting to see how a newer/smaller language was impacted by a group co-opting the the development and platform. Whoops.
- shoo 6y ago
  My advanced Go AI, written in Go, is now able to predict, with modest accuracy, the next line of Go code that should be bashed into the text editor: func PredictNextCodingMove(ctx context.Context, source string, cursor int) (string, error) { return "if err != nil {", nil }
- cli 6y ago
  I have the opposite experience on this site. I am not a software engineer, so every time I see the word "go" in a submission title, my first thought is of the game.
danbmil99 6y ago
I remember the first time something like this happened: Drum machines. All my drummer friends were seriously in their cups. OTOH, they complained that the machines were too perfect, without the human touch. OTOH, they complained that it was impossible to play that perfectly, so they were out of a job. In the end, there were still drummers, and it is generally recognized that live drumming is, aesthetically speaking, a different thing than sequenced, sampled drum tracks. I've never heard a drum machine that can truly capture the sound and feel of John Bonham, Keith Moon, Stuart Copeland, or Ringo Starr. It's just a different thing.
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  >I've never heard a drum machine that can truly capture the sound and feel of John Bonham, Keith Moon, Stuart Copeland, or Ringo Starr. It's just a different thing The only way to establish that would be through blind listening tests.
  - danbmil99 6y ago
    Nerdy but true

161 points by apetresc 6y ago

I love the idea of tea ceremony before a lesson. I'd hate for that culture to be lost entirely. Ironically, the AI-Explainability problem is, at least for now, an asset. The model can't explain its strategy, only that it judges some positions stronger than others based on a huge amount of experience. That reduction of aggregate experience to comprehensible language is still (mostly) in the realm of humans and so should provide a bridge for talented, insightful teachers to teach the next generation.

YetAnotherNick 6y ago
Top chess engines are atleast 700-800 points above top human. Engines have been absolutely unbeatable for humans for 10 years. Still I don't see the culture lost. In fact, it is easier for anyone to see mistakes after every match in less than a minute and you don't need a coach to point it for you.
- bonzini 6y ago
  Seeing mistakes after the fact is one thing. Developing the thought process you need to see the mistakes during the game is a whole different thing, and that's where a coach helps. Also a computer won't tell you its plan and why it chose it.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    The computer makes the tactical blunders very clear. For strategic/positional issues, it is not nearly as good a teacher.
prerok 6y ago
I like this train of thought. It's actually the same as Douglas Adams'. Now we know the answer is 42 and now we need to solve what the question really was :) I think it's ironic how he foresaw the problem we are experiencing with AI right now.
Buttons840 6y ago
I wonder how often human players invent explanations for what is really just a gut instinct?
- faceplanted 6y ago
  I wonder if there's actually any kind of line between "inventing explanations" and actually theorising and studying the game's mechanics. Obviously it's mostly pattern recognition, but that pattern recognition is partitioning parts of the board into classifications of what those sections are doing and whether to prioritise them or let it go in favour of something else, the immediate decisions within those sections are fairly logical. The more complex broader pattern recognition is how those sections will interact as they approach each other, which if there is that much inventing explanations where I imagine it comes in.

yakcyll 6y ago

Along with a response from Antti Törmänen 1p, a Finnish professional: https://www.nordicgodojo.eu/post/276/impact-of-go-ai-on-the-professional-go-world-response https://www.nordicgodojo.eu/post/276/impact-of-go-ai-on-the-...

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
Thanks for posting that. The example about a very strong Go AI opening with the black hole opening. I am a double digit kyu player, but I enjoyed clicking through the most recent game with it: http://www.yss-aya.com/cgos/viewer.cgi?19x19/SGF/2020/08/21/713326.sgf http://www.yss-aya.com/cgos/viewer.cgi?19x19/SGF/2020/08/21/... The battle in the upper left was fascinating!
morelisp 6y ago
I think this might hit on the key as to why demand for teaching is dropping even though AIs don't really replace good teaching: > Lee seems to combine these two with the silent assumption that the professionals’ goal is to strive for the ‘highest possible level of go’, which is no longer possible because the ai cannot be beat; incidentally, Lee Sedol remarked something similar when he announced his retirement. To me, on the other hand, it seems like nothing has changed because I have always reached for the ‘highest possible personal level of go’, and this should be the same for most players who are not near the top of the world. Perhaps it has less to do with being at "the top of the world" and more to do with the role of the game in the broader culture. If what attracts you is not just your personal drive to improve, but the sense of overall societal contribution, that will surely wane if training goes towards study of AI rather than active research in play. On the other hand in the US/Europe such a thing hardly exists at all even for professional players. Maybe a comparison point: What happened to voice and instrument lessons once recorded music became commonplace? In the fairly recent past any social group that wanted to listen to decent music must have had a member who was at least a slightly-above-average musician; and once they didn't need that anymore, that skill may have significantly dropped in social standing. That doesn't mean no one takes lessons anymore, but it seems like the number would have greatly reduced. (On the other hand, the median interest level and drive among people taking lessons probably increased.) (Does that mean the go world is going to have to find its equivalent of Kurt Cobain to get lessons started again?)

nopinsight 6y ago

The article is an interesting discussion by a Go insider in Korea. Regarding the impact on pro-level teaching: “The demand for pro-level teaching games and private lessons has plummeted. Professional players used to command a high price for teaching games and lessons, and this has been a critical source of income for many pros.” I think the community would also be interested in articles which discuss the impact of AI on professionals in other fields, obviously chess, but also more distant ones such as e-sports and language translation. —— On language, I would guess that the demand for non-certified translation might plummet between many major languages and English since automatic translation of documents is now quite close to human level when there is sufficient training data. Down the line, might this reduce the demand for advanced foreign language skills and thus change the career paths of language majors as well?

maletor 6y ago
This is interesting and doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't learn good form just by playing a good opponent.
- comboy 6y ago
  I think you can. Especially when you can browse the tree which is similar to asking your teacher "what if" questions. Many players I know learned how to play pretty well on 9x9 by playing a computer program. I'd argue you can even learn much faster playing a program, because for high level players many sequences were based purely on memorization (including point values) but now seeing different results quickly you can understand it better. And the level where your play is based on high level abstractions like influence and group strength is not that hard to reach and it wouldn't take much to reason them out just from the games.
  - Trombone12 6y ago
    I think the proper statement is that it's possible, but not efficient. Learning go from a go-program seems much like learning assembly from gcc.

_acco 6y ago

If you haven't seen it, the documentary on DeepMind's AlphaGo is very well done. The climax revolves around the AI expressing what we humans call "creativity" in a match against decorated player Lee Sedol. Watching Lee Sedol's reaction is deeply moving. Free to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

JRKrause 6y ago
This comment, that AlphaGo showed "creativity", seems so ridiculous to me. Alphago is operating purely on bayesian statistics (with very good priors) so it's decisions are exactly the opposite of creativity.
- _acco 6y ago
  It's an invitation to define (or re-define) creativity, my friend :) If it seems ridiculous to you, that's a good signal that you'd get a lot out of digging into philosophy of mind. Where do our thoughts come from? Creativity? Is it so preposterous that these too arise from probabilistic electrical storms - but in wet matter as opposed to hard? Where thoughts come from may be too complex for us to model now, maybe ever. But if you look deep enough, I think you'll find at heart deterministic processes driven by networks that were trained through nature + nurture. Maybe creativity is less ethereal than we perceive. Maybe it would benefit us to start considering how non-sentient intelligence can achieve it.
  - JRKrause 6y ago
    I am not making, and do not explicitly agree with, the statement that only human brains are imbued with 'creativity'. However, the core of the alphaGo algorithm is just a monte-carlo tree search of the game initially populated with prior estimates of the value of each game state(with the generation of the prior value estimates being carried out by the DNN). I see no space in this simplistic statistical game analysis for concepts such as creativity. The move in question was chosen because it's prior value estimate by alphaGo was favorable and upon further analysis was concluded to be the most likely to result in a game victory relative to all other available moves. If alphaGo was only trained on human matches and subsequently was able to discover moves that drastically deviate from typical human strategies, I would be more open to labeling it as creative. However, most of alphaGo's training is carried out against itself, it's entirely possible that alphaGo has made this particular(or similar) move many times against itself during training.

hcnews 6y ago

Chess went through a similar transition in the last 10-20 years when computers became much stronger than the best human. Some of her points are valid, some of them are temporary. 1. Professional gameplay changes a lot. There are no more secret openings/midgames/endgames, you will hardly be able to cheese a top pro (not that it was easy before). Professional gameplay requires memorizing tons of lines and then adding on to add it. There are many chess openings which require memorization till the end result (50 moves) or you risk losing the game. We are going to see a similar trend of memorization in Go. 2. Online casual gameplay changes a lot. There are lot of cheaters in online forums. Cheat detection has to be built in to the sites or you risk being taken over by cheaters. Easy availability to best moves allows the dedicated player to learn a lot faster than previously where there was a discoverability issue. We see this in the professional chess world where its not uncommon to see 14-16 yr old GMs nowadays. 3. Professional teaching still survives. Engine can tell you the best move but it doesn't give you a teaching path from beginner to amateur professional to grand master. I am not a master but based on anecdotal evidence people still employ coaches but for much more focussed tasks and more specialized skills (e.g. openings, midgames, endgames).

benchaney 6y ago
I disagree about memorization. That may be true for chess, but the go board is too large and the game to long for that to be viable. In the opening, bots will generally recommend several places per move that lose 0 or -0.1 points compared to its preferred move. You would have to memorize thousands of opening just to have a chance of still being in book for the entire opening, and even then your opponent can take your out of your preparations at a cost of less than 1 point.
- __s 6y ago
  To add to your point, Fischer was complaining about chess openings going stale 20 years before computers came on the scene
  - jmcgough 6y ago
    After he fell out of the pro scene he became way more interested in chess variants than vanilla chess (more specifically his Fischer Random Chess). I can't imagine being at the level he was at, where you needed to hundreds or thousands of hours memorizing and practicing openings... so not surprised he appreciated a game that valued more on-the-fly decision making than heavy preparation.

joerickard 6y ago

A friend put out a related post that I found enjoyable. It has some good background information. https://brantondemoss.com/writing/kata/ https://brantondemoss.com/writing/kata/

umvi 6y ago

Slight tangent, but the barrier of entry to play Go is quite high. I've been learning over the past few months and it's very frustrating. My biggest complaint is that the jargon is just out of control. For whatever reason, instead of localizing go jargon like the chess community has done, the Go community just uses native japanese terms for everything. This makes it super confusing as a beginner and you basically have to have the wiki[0] open all the time if you have any hope of understanding what people are saying. For example, when reading a beginner's article: "In this case you can't move here because of ko, so you would instead look for other pieces that are atari or close to atari - just be careful of seki" Would a bit of localization killed the go community? "In this case you can't move here because of the repetition rule, so you would instead look for other groups of pieces that can be captured or are close to being captured - just be careful not to get in a capture-stalemate scenario" My second biggest complaint is that scoring is not straightforward at all and there are 2 rule sets (Chinese, Japanese). Which ruleset should I use? Are there any subtle strategy changes you need to make when switching between rulesets? When playing I have no idea who is currently winning if it looks close (i.e. roughly equal white/black areas) and I basically just wait for the computer to announce the winner at the end. Anyway, just venting about my frustrations learning Go. Chess, by comparison, was much easier to learn. I didn't feel swamped with jargon and it was much easier for me to grasp which side was winning (though occasionally good chess players can pull a checkmate out of a seeming disadvantaged situation that I didn't see coming!) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms

lacker 6y ago
The English-speaking Go community is just many times smaller than the English-speaking chess community. Many of the best books for Go are translated versions of foreign ones, there aren’t many popular streamers to learn from, all sort of educational material is not there because the market isn’t there.
comboy 6y ago
Biggest community is in Asia. When you visit tournaments common language for what's happening on the board is really nice to have. If you stick around that's like <0.01% of what you need to learn anyway. Plus you've learned where Atari name came from :) Japanese counting is more popular but you really don't need to worry about it until some high dan level if you play on 19x19. It takes a long, long time before you will be able to say confidently who is winning on 19x19 if the game is close. I suck at Chess, but to me Go was much easier to learn. You can have quite a lot of fun without studying any openings.

suyash 6y ago

This is one of the unfortunately reality of advances in technology specially AI. It started with games like Chess and Go, wait and watch as AI will eat into other creative human endeavors - both logical like accounting, programming and creative like art, music etc. How humans will deal with watching AI get better and better than us in many areas will be interesting to see.

makapuf 6y ago
The thing is games are relatively innocuous but then when it works well you'll see ai applied to higher stakes decision: why not trading by example? Is AI trading a thing? Does it provide an advantage yet? And what is the impact on trading when all of it is automated?
- naveen99 6y ago
  Trading is harder because people start with different amounts of capital and different risk tolerance. The more capital you have the more illiquid the market becomes and less predictable.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    Capital and risk level seem to me something that AIs would be extremely good at adjusting for -- more so that humans, who will bring irrational thoughts into it.
- suyash 6y ago
  trading was one of the first ones to be disrupted - algorithmic treating was using old school AI, I'm sure Deep Learning is being used now a days.

hoytech 6y ago

I'm told that in the 70s, when backgammon players had a dispute about the correctness of a move (usually a double), they would agree to continually setup the board from that position and play game after game, until somebody capitulates (or runs out of money). Nowadays we just make a side-bet about what XG mobile will think about the move.

Cd00d 6y ago

Lol. This a pointless comment to the people interested, but I'm so amused with my stupidity I had to share. I opened this thread with absolutely no thought about the _game_ Go, and read the top comment about how chess changed in the last 10-20 years thinking it was tangentially related because of Watson and whatnot playing AI chess. I came here thinking I was going to read comments about how the Go language has been impacted with the introduction of ML and AI packages that attract data science types from Python and R. I thought it would be interesting to see how a newer/smaller language was impacted by a group co-opting the the development and platform. Whoops.

shoo 6y ago
My advanced Go AI, written in Go, is now able to predict, with modest accuracy, the next line of Go code that should be bashed into the text editor: func PredictNextCodingMove(ctx context.Context, source string, cursor int) (string, error) { return "if err != nil {", nil }
cli 6y ago
I have the opposite experience on this site. I am not a software engineer, so every time I see the word "go" in a submission title, my first thought is of the game.

danbmil99 6y ago

I remember the first time something like this happened: Drum machines. All my drummer friends were seriously in their cups. OTOH, they complained that the machines were too perfect, without the human touch. OTOH, they complained that it was impossible to play that perfectly, so they were out of a job. In the end, there were still drummers, and it is generally recognized that live drumming is, aesthetically speaking, a different thing than sequenced, sampled drum tracks. I've never heard a drum machine that can truly capture the sound and feel of John Bonham, Keith Moon, Stuart Copeland, or Ringo Starr. It's just a different thing.

optimalsolver 6y ago
>I've never heard a drum machine that can truly capture the sound and feel of John Bonham, Keith Moon, Stuart Copeland, or Ringo Starr. It's just a different thing The only way to establish that would be through blind listening tests.
- danbmil99 6y ago
  Nerdy but true