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After AI beat them, professional Go players got better and more creative

428 points by iNic 3y ago

lordnacho 3y ago
This is the tip of the iceberg, right? It's foreshadowing AI helping experts become better. I can see it happening in a lot of creative fields, including software. Perhaps this is where it really pulls the experts from the juniors, because only experts will be able to judge whether the AI has helped him create something actually good.
- asolove 3y ago
  Go is a constructed game with a precise definition of the rules and victory. The real challenge with AI helping experts is whether it can correctly help them balance their own value function for what "better" means. And whether we can still train human experts who can think about that independently with good judgement, if we've automated away the things that beginners would normally do to train their judgement with black boxes that they can't interrogate. Will be interesting for sure.
- gcanko 3y ago
  It's exactly like the invention of agriculture. Not having to hunt for food gave more opportunities for intellectual pursuits because of having more free time.
  - rwbt 3y ago
    I'm skeptical of this argument. It gave free time to some people i.e. the landed gentry but also created the toiling peasants and a hierarchical civilization.
    - choilive 3y ago
      Many other types of governance was enabled by the agricultural revolution, not just feudalism.
    - ohyes 3y ago
      Toiling peasants had more free time than we do today.
      - rwbt 3y ago
        Hunter gatherers had more leisure than farming peasants. Surely, one can spot the trend.
      - TulliusCicero 3y ago
        [citation needed]
      - ummonk 3y ago
        The amount of toiling they could do without dying was calorically limited. Having lethargy induced by a shortage of food doesn’t necessarily mean a preferable lifestyle.
      - brailsafe 3y ago
        Pfft, disagree. Got laid off a year ago and have had nearly 100% free time since
      - nicklecompte 3y ago
        "Who's going to teach those idle medieval peasants to read, Ben? Augustine-man?!"
      - TulliusCicero 3y ago
        As I understand it, this is largely inaccurate. People just read "days off" as "more time", even though peasant farmers would need to engage in a lot of labor around the farm or household even on "days off" (your cows and chickens don't care that you're on vacation). Of course people still do some chores today even on days off, but it's a lot less than you need to do on a farm, ask basically any farmer.
    - ravelfan 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    No, it just meant you could support more people on the same amount of land. Non-mechanised agriculture is very labour-intensive compared to hunting.
- jasonfarnon 3y ago
  I can't think of any reason we should be so lucky that AI will have a ceiling somewhere between human "juniors" and human "experts"
  - aaron695 3y ago
    [dead]
- Arrath 3y ago
  Maybe I'm too small minded but I would love to see AI like this enhance...well, the AI in games in general. I long for the day where I no longer play Civilization or an RTS against AI that has perfect knowledge, or is given handicaps to allow it to be competitive.
  - sandspar 3y ago
    Flight simulators are set to benefit from AI. Imagine talking to an AI Air Traffic Control that understands natural language. Imagine walking down the aisle of your plane and overhearing AI people's conversations.
- gwern 3y ago
  > It's foreshadowing AI helping experts become better. The humans are still way worse than the Go programs. People are still willing to pay them to play a game as entertainment. Are lots of people willing to pay you to do whatever it is you do even when AIs do it much better, out of sheer entertainment value & sentimentality? If they are willing to pay you in particular, how many other people like you are they also willing to pay for, and is that number much greater than or much less than the current number paid to do it?
  - nottorp 3y ago
    People are also cheering for Usain Bolt or whoever is the speediest runner this year, in spite of being able to outrun him by simply getting into a car...
    - sandspar 3y ago
      I think about this at the gym. I feel very proud of myself when I can go from being 1% as strong as a front-end loader to being 1.1% as strong. The king of my gym, the most high status guy there, is up to maybe 3%.
      - nottorp 3y ago
        That 0.1% is a 10% for you which is great progress!
    - gwern 3y ago
      "If they are willing to pay you in particular, how many other people like you are they also willing to pay for, and is that number much greater than or much less than the current number paid to do it?" There are not many Usain Bolts out there: just one, as a matter of fact. Who is Usain Bolt #100? Or #1000?
      - nottorp 3y ago
        A good bunch of the people he beat were also paid.
- LouisSayers 3y ago
  I'd say GPT4 has definitely helped me become a better programmer - I'm able to ask it questions, learn how I can refactor my code better, or approach a problem in a way I might not have considered. It does hit its limits, but it's been so useful - it's a funny cycle of training AI and having it train us, a great symbiotic relationship.
- veunes 3y ago
  Absolutely! We're just beginning to scratch the surface of how AI can augment and enhance human expertise in various fields
akira2501 3y ago
The other possibility is that it destroyed the incidental dogma that tends to build up in these types of games and human activities. This is why I like the "hacker ethos" as much as I do, it tends to eschew things like "accepted" dogma in order to find additional performance that other people were just leaving on the table out of polite comfort.
- JustLurking2022 3y ago
  The dogma generally becomes accepted because it outperforms other known strategies. In a game like Go, that could previously take a while because there are so many possible follow-ups that it takes time to accumulate enough data on whether a new strategy is actually decisively better, or just worse but over-performing because it's less known. There's a big difference between those two and "the hacker ethos" will lead to a lot of the latter. However, now computers can simulate enough games to give a relatively high degree of confidence that a variation in strategy is truly better.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    I don't know how it's developed since, but from what I remember that was how it started - the AIs weren't following the standard moves (joseki) that we'd built up over centuries and human players were thrown off by the nonstandard responses that were working better than expected.
    - foota 3y ago
      I wonder if AI could be built to continually adapt, so that instead of playing an optimal strategy, it instead chooses between various suboptimal strategies. If humans train to play against the optimal strategy, then maybe the AI could do better by playing in suboptimally but less expected ways.
      - mafuy 3y ago
        This is already happening. The point differences for sometimes huge deviations are minuscule, so it's worthwhile to have in one's repertoire. The same is mostly true for purely human games, too: These are trick moves.
dtnewman 3y ago
Just look to Chess. The top players today are way better than any of the greats before, because they can train against computers and know exactly where they failed. That said, because they've gotten so good, chess at the top levels is pretty boring... it's hard to come up with a unique strategy so players tend to be defensive. Lots of ties. On the other hand, chess is more popular than ever. It's huge in high schools. I see people playing it everywhere. I know that for me, I love being able to play a game and then view the computer analysis afterwards and see exactly what I did wrong (granted, sometimes a move can be good for a computer who will know how to follow through on the next 10 moves, but not necessarily good for me... but most of the time I can see where I made a mistake when the computer points it out). Side note: I play on LIChess and it's great. Is there an equivalent app for Go?
- tptacek 3y ago
  online-go.com
  - anononaut 3y ago
    OGS is definitely the best server in the West. Deserves all patronage it gets and more. I wish the AGA was more supportive of it rather than KGS.
    - naet 3y ago
      KGS is still pretty great. OGS might be more accessible to new players with one click sign in and a better web app, but I think KGS has a higher population of true dan+ strength players, and has a stronger "culture" around community reviews and studying. It used to be even better, but there are less total people playing on KGS than the previous peak.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        I found the culture on OGS, particularly wrt moderation, to be pretty great (as a newcomer, and I exclusively play 9x9). I've read about KGS but I've never figured out how to engage with it. (I know it to be the OG, srs bzns venue, though).
yinser 3y ago
Computers were always going to be better at searching large trees, now they can help steer new heuristics for human players.
- SonOfLilit 3y ago
  I'm not sure a computer without search defeats the best human playing without any search, but I know it defeats 1dan players (very smart people who put in 5-10 years of deliberate practice) when they are allowed to use as much search as they are able.
  - mafuy 3y ago
    In I believe it was the AlphaGo Zero paper, pure policy without tree search was estimated to be near pro level. KataGo is likely much better. I'm 3 dan (yet not smart) and I will definitely lose to it even with some handicap >:-(
    - SonOfLilit 3y ago
      Thanks. I remembered 1 dan, I didn't remember if regular or pro.
lvl102 3y ago
Pro players train with AI and you can often see “blue dot” moves in tournament settings.
- anononaut 3y ago
  It's become go broadcasting standard to show some AI bot's win/loss confidence percentage for a given board state. It was fascinating for a few years, but now I feel like it takes away from some of the magic of watching pro level play.
tptacek 3y ago
When you read Go strategy resources, you see a lot of things divided into what best practices were before AlphaGo and what they are now. It's a whole big thing. It is still the case, though, that AI dominates humans at Go; humans didn't get so creative about the game that they put AI back on its toes (though some did discover exploitable AI "strategy bugs").
- pa7ch 3y ago
  Agreed, but I still think humans should get a little more credit for winning against AI no matter how. Its a competitive game with very simple and clear rules. A hole in AI strategy is a hole, even if quickly patched! I am still so impressed that Lee Sedol beat Alpha Go 1 game out of 5 way back when AI made its breakout. I was sad he felt so sheepish afterward for losing. In hindsight, I think it was an amazing accomplishment even if today an AI could beat Shin Jin-Seo (#1 player) 100 out of 100 times!
- paulcole 3y ago
  This is true in Scrabble as well. When I was playing seriously there were strong players who played a ton over a board and had deep intuition about what made plays good and what made plays bad. In the late 1990s/ early 2000s there started to be a lot more in the way of computer simulation and analysis and some very strong computer players. One (general) example was that older players liked the idea of making longer plays using more tiles to "win" a race to the S and blank tiles (the best tiles in the bag). Computer simulations generally show that turnover (as this is called) isn't optimal and you're better off holding strong combinations of letters rather than playing them off hoping to draw something better. Now younger players are better than ever because all of their training came with the help of computer analysis and simulation. Of course in Scrabble a huge part of it comes down to just memorizing the words in the dictionary.
  - cdelsolar 3y ago
    AI doesn't dominate people in Scrabble though. The best humans are better than the best AI.
Mtinie 3y ago
This supports with my hypothesis about human-created art, post-AI. People are deeply concerned about how their livelihoods and identities will survive the next few years. I get it, and while there’s certainly a level of existential dread that feels reasonable, I don’t see many people yet discussing what the visual arts industries will look like on the other side. If Go play is in any way a creative exercise—which I’ve heard it is— then I’m super interested to see the state of humans in the arts 24 months out from now.
- jsheard 3y ago
  There is a key difference in the way these models are trained - Chess and Go have clearly defined win conditions, so a model can be taught to explore the possibility space and try to reach victory by any means necessary, potentially with strategies which have never been seen before. With art on the other hand there is no objective measure of quality, so the models are instead taught to treat already existing art as the benchmark to strive towards, making them trite by nature. As I see it AI can absolutely find innovative solutions, but only if you can clearly and explicitly define the problem it needs to solve.
  - Mtinie 3y ago
    I use diffusion models and other generative tools to give me inspiration for works. While these aren’t solutions, per say, the tools do help me define (and refine) my approaches and offer visual options to consider.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    With art on the other hand there is no objective measure of quality, so the models are instead taught to treat already existing art as the benchmark to strive towards, making them trite by nature. Isn't this reminiscent of the arguments that were made at the dawn of photography as an art form? Some were afraid that portraiture was finished as an art form, but we got Impressionism, Cubism, and a host of other innovative forms to take its place. Never mind that portraiture was not in fact killed by photography, nor was any other visual form. Others swore that cameras and film would never be valid implements of art, but they got awfully quiet when Adams and Weston and others showed up on the scene, and you don't hear much from them at all these days. If nobody was afraid of AI -- if nobody was screaming bloody murder about how urgent it was to stop it -- only then could we safely say that it will have no role or relevance in art.
zerocrates 3y ago
Just finally getting around to reading/finishing my copy of Seven Games by Oliver Roeder, which covers checkers, chess, go, backgammon, poker, Scrabble and bridge, and the efforts for computers winning/solving each. A common theme is the effects of the computers on the human players in elevating (but maybe also homogenizing) play.
matthest 3y ago
Entertainment is one industry that will survive post-AI. We're still going to want to watch humans play sports, music and video games. We're going to want to watch humans act, cook food, and make vlogs. The chess industry is growing rapidly, even though it has already been conquered by AI: https://www.einpresswire.com/article/649379223/chess-market-to-experience-strong-growth-during-the-forecast-period-2023-2030 https://www.einpresswire.com/article/649379223/chess-market-...
- ultra_nick 3y ago
  There are content farms in Facebook churning out fake grandkids for old folks to fawn over.
- suyash 3y ago
  That's the next one on the chopping block, wait till Sora and related services comes out, it's all going to be digitally generated and will look just as real so yes it will be content about humans but without human doing/creating much of it.
  - tylerchilds 3y ago
    as both an engineer and an entertainer, perception is reality. on the one hand, a computer system could 1:1 recreate a stunt a human did and elevate it to a stunt a human couldn’t do. people witness entertainment to trick their minds, and the disbelief and astonishment in the human condition hinges on “there’s no way _i_ could do that” and once they know they literally could not have done it, they’re not impressed. they may pay to be fooled once, but never twice. there’s a market for what you’re talking about, but that space is b2b and not c2c, which is where entertainment money flows. tl;dr dollar for dollar, ai vs taylor swift, taylor swift wins every time, no contest.
    - hackable_sand 3y ago
      > they’re not impressed This is subjective. Impressive things impress. It can be the hand-drawn impossible stunts from the 30's, or a CGI stunt from 2019.
Lacerda69 3y ago
AI will force artists to learn how to draw perfect hands as every artwork with bad hands will be instantly flagged as generated.
Art9681 3y ago
When AI beats Go players, they roll up their sleeves and practice their passion and try to get better. When AI beats Hollywood...
- Tenoke 3y ago
  The reward in Hollywood and most professional fields is about who makes the best/most cost efficient product no matter what. If the same was true for chess or go then players would be using computer assistance in every top level game.
- anononaut 3y ago
  I see the point you're making, and well made, but I think it also highlights a distinction in problems between the two. In the case of go, people who want to play go are the main motivating force. In the case of movies, I don't give a damn about Hollywood, the money, the studios, the IP, the actors. I only care about the quality of the film. Maybe the autuer, if there is one. AI changing conceptions about chess or go is very different than generative Ai which can radically change the means of how something is produced. I'm still going to play go because I love it. Meanwhile, I would happily cut out film studios (as we know them) if it meant I got to watch quality cinema.
timetraveller26 3y ago
I watched the alpha go doc and it was really shocking to me when one of the top go players decided to retire because the game was meaningless now that computers could beat anybody. it's good seeing that that wasn't the case for all players.
- Solvency 3y ago
  i don't get it, this applies to every single game. you can't beat aimbots in fps, you can even rig any game bot to play perfectly. that's why you play against HUMANS.
  - gensym 3y ago
    I enjoy rock climbing even though I'll never be as good as a monkey or a mountain goat.
    - krisoft 3y ago
      Yeah but the difference is that you were always worse than a monkey or a mountain goat. And those are all worse than someone riding a helicopter to the top. So you didn’t had to change your mindset in this regard ever. Imagine if you grow up where there are no monkeys, mountain goats or helicopter rides to the top. You never heard of them, they are not a thing in your world. And you put in hard work to become a very very good rock climber. You kinda fancy yourself an apex climber. Maybe your mate George is a bit faster than you sometimes, but sometimes you are faster than him. Sometimes Sarah beaths the both of you, but sometimes you beat her times. You are kinda up there with the bests as far as you know. And then suddenly someone brings a monkey to your rock climbing gym and the monkey smokes all of you. It climbs walls much better than you ever could. Now you have to adapt. Will you change your viewpoint and start seeing yourself as “best among humans” and keep competing like that? Or will you see yourself as “clearly outcompeted so badly I might even give up”? Some people will go one way, some the other way. And then the new generation will grow up with the knowledge of monkeys, and they all naturally will be only the first kind of people, who understand that they can’t be the best only best among their class. Go players had their “the first monkey shows up in the climbing gym” moment during our lifetime. That is why you see some of the players react like that. That is a very different world from rock climbing where everyone already knows about monkeys, and mountain goats and helicopter rides since forever. Every person currently climbing rocks started climbing with the existence of monkeys, mountain goats and helicopters already incorporated into their thinking way before they climbed their first wall.
intuitionist 3y ago
The blog doesn’t say anything about how this “decision quality” metric is calculated… but presumably it’s using very similar Go evaluation functions to the ones used in the superhuman AI players, right? I think it’s highly unsurprising that humans would improve by that metric — they’re learning from the machine, so of course the machine likes it. Also, most things in life are not two-player zero-sum games where you can construct an evaluation function and build a “decision quality” metric out of it. So I’m not sure what the takeaway should be in those cases.
- SonOfLilit 3y ago
  Computers are so much better than humans at Go that the metric for board evaluation applies better to human games than it does to computer games. Just as I'm better at evaluating code written by GPT than code written by senior developers. Otherwise you'd see players who don't train with computers winning in tournaments against those who do.
  - intuitionist 3y ago
    Yeah, I don’t think the metric is wrong or bad, just that it’s not telling us anything special. Or maybe it’s telling us something about Go AIs (that the “insights” they have are human-comprehensible) but it’s not at all clear that this fully generalizes.
    - visarga 3y ago
      Of course it doesn't work that easy in other fields. Basically the go board is an environment, the the AI model learns by creating its experiences in the environment. This can be applied to other kinds of environment, such as code execution, simulation, video games, human-AI chat rooms or robots. But each environment has its own complexity and searching for good strategies can take a long time. It's the same with scientific research, got to validate the theory in the world.
    - SonOfLilit 3y ago
      It sounds from your analysis that "better as evaluated by AI" would be true even if it wasn't really objectively better. All I'm saying is that yes, it does mean objectively better in this case.
usgroup 3y ago
Can I rephrase this? "Professional Go players finally have a software good enough to beat them, as a result of which they got better by using the software".
- ajkjk 3y ago
  No? The article makes the point explicitly that they did not only get better by using the software; they're also better at playing moves the computer does not play.
  - SonOfLilit 3y ago
    It makes the point that they learned not only by memorization. They still learned it by using the software.
kccqzy 3y ago
> Shin et al calculate about 40 percent of the improvement came from moves that could have been memorized by studying the AI. But moves that deviated from what the AI would do also improved, and these “human moves” accounted for 60 percent of the improvement. I don't often play Go myself but a number of my friends do. Among non-professional players, it is really common to see game play being not as exciting as before because there's now an easy way: just memorize and copy what the AI does. I don't doubt that professional players still have a ton of creativity, but a lot of non-pros don't really have too much creativity and the whole game becomes memorizing and replicating AI moves.
- thomasahle 3y ago
  > a lot of non-pros don't really have too much creativity and the whole game becomes memorizing and replicating AI moves. That makes no sense. After 10-20 moves you are surely in a position that has never been played before. How do you memorize moves after that?
  - datameta 3y ago
    Perhaps sub-positions still repeat with some regularity? Meaning subsets of the board. I have never played Go however, I've only seen the board and read the rules.
    - mafuy 3y ago
      Absolutely so. There are corner patterns but also side patterns and other patterns; all of them are 'joseki', known and often played sequences. These can be memorized. But that's almost useless without understanding why these patterns are good. You still need to pick a pattern that works well with the rest of the board, in particular which conditions elsewhere on the board influence it (ladders, ko) and you need to know all the punishments for deviations. That's really difficult and often subtle, and it is where strong players as well as AI easily outplay someone who just mindlessly memorized patterns.
  - hibikir 3y ago
    You'd be surprised. Joseki are corner shapes, which might interact with other corners in the medium to long run, but whose interactions are way too difficult for any human to understand well. Therefore, you have 4 corners, and it's quite likely that you'll see 4 joseki getting played in any game. Joseki sequences have been studied for a long time, so they can be relatively long: Say, 15+ moves of an avalanche joseki, memorized by both players, and that's just one corner. So even before computers were any good, you could still see pretty iffy players using memorized patterns in every corner for a total way past 20 moves.
idkdotcom 3y ago
Go is a finite search game. So each chess. Equating intelligence to being good as these games is as silly as equating intelligence to being good at solving differential equations. Computers have bested humans at solving differential equations for many decades now. Nobody said "gee humans are now stupid". AI, as a knowledge field, is biased in this notion that all it matters when it comes to intelligence is that computers beat humans at Go or Chess.
suyash 3y ago
It's just a little boost, AI will keep getting better and better at faster pace, humans will have to figure out a different strategy all together.
bravura 3y ago
1) I would really be interested in broad brush strokes to understand how go theory has expanded. 2) I really wish we could shake the ant-farm with chess and go Fischer random chess. There's something nice about not having to memorize openings.
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  At the same time, the familiarity of openings is nice. Imagine completely random WoW battlegrounds. Part of the fun is knowing the territory and strategies rather than having to make them up from scratch each game.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
    WoW battlegrounds?
f_allwein 3y ago
„Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings“ Rilke, „The Beholder“ https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2009/11/man-watching-der-schauende-by-rainer.html?m=1 https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2009/11/man-watching-der-scha...
andrewstuart 3y ago
If I was a professional player of any sort of game that AI can play then I would never play against AI. Just be a human, play against other humans. Who cares what AI can do?
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  People who want to get better care. Everyone who plays chess uses AI to improve.
- veunes 3y ago
  In order to be better you need practice more, AI can be there for you all the time
deleted 3y ago
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ummonk 3y ago
The article is misleading regarding the history of chess. Magnus excepted, most top players did adopt a more cold and calculating material-focused chess style that mimicked Deep Blue and subsequent chess computers. It was only with the success of AlphaGo and LC0 that top chess players have started playing a more creative playstyle again, playing various wing pawn advances, as well as being more willing to give up material for nebulous initiative or positional advantages.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
Seven years ago I took remote Go playing lessons from a South Korean professional player. I stopped after about 5 months and started using CS Pro Go on my iPad Pro and it has a nice teaching feature of rating every one of my moves so after a game I can see where my biggest mistakes were. This is different than pro players learning new surprising strategies, for me it is nice to use.
seoulmetro 3y ago
Is this a surprise? The best people at any craft learn from the people that beat them.
bobogei81123 3y ago
Back when I was a kid learning go, I was taught that the kick joseki (a standard sequence of moves, similar to chess opening) [1] is a bad move, and you were considered trolling (and the teacher would not be pleased) if you played a 3-3 invasion [2] during the opening phase. These are all vindicated thanks to the AI and played pretty commonly nowadays. AI definitely helped eliminate many dogma and myths in go. [1] https://senseis.xmp.net/?44PointLowApproach#toc6 https://senseis.xmp.net/?44PointLowApproach#toc6 [2] https://senseis.xmp.net/?33PointInvasion#toc2 https://senseis.xmp.net/?33PointInvasion#toc2
- chewxy 3y ago
  you have to admit that 3-3 invasion is pretty annoying to handle. AI is way too aggro and people are learning to be as aggressive.
- falserum 3y ago
  3-3 invasion takes teritory at the expense of influence (future potential). I think I improved a lot when I stopped 3-3ing (it opened up different style of game for me) Noobies love 3-3 (I definitely did), because it’s kind of simple and familiar move. (Especially at the start of the game, when board is empty, there is gadzilion of possibilities and most of them unknown and possibly risky) If not discouraging 3-3, I would still recommend starting without it, to learn that way of play (if for nothing else, to deal with 3-3 invasions)
- lawn 3y ago
  I'll suggest that a 3-3 invasion is still a bad move for amateurs because they don't follow it up correctly and it may hamper their learning.
  - Wildgoose 3y ago
    Agreed. With a 3-3 you are trading away influence in favour of hard territory. AI is happy to do that very early because AI can effectively destroy influence. Human players need to learn to enter 3-3 at "the last possible moment". That requires judgement.
yieldcrv 3y ago
> After a few years, the weakest professional players were better than the strongest players before AI. The strongest players pushed beyond what had been thought possible. Human Instrumentality Project
baobabKoodaa 3y ago
I really enjoyed the upbeat positive outlook of the article. Unfortunately, as an ex poker pro, I find it hard to imagine that AI "lifts people up" in domains like games. Sandholm's bots pretty much destroyed poker.
- sinuhe69 3y ago
  Poker is all about “taking the emotion out of the game”, isn’t? In such cases, what can beat a machine? Doesn't a machine naturally have the best “poker face”?
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    The idea of "poker face" isn't really relevant as most people have a "good enough" pokerface. The idea of looking into your opponent's eyes and just feeling out what they have is something from movies, not real life (I'm sure you can find exceptions to the rule, but this is true in the general case). What can beat a machine? Another machine, sadly. We are well past the point where machines surpasses humans in most poker variants.
WalterBright 3y ago
A new species arrives on the chess plain. Humans learn and adapt.
- sandspar 3y ago
  I could see AI being similar to the domestication of wolves. Humans encounter superior species, we co-opt the species to both species' benefit. Maybe AI would benefit from keeping us around. For example, we could test paths for it. Keeping a suboptimal pet like us for testing eliminates weak strategies, like a QA team finding bugs. It strengthens approaches by exposing flaws early.
- veunes 3y ago
  AI actually does the same... learns and adapts
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I know. It will decide our fate in a microsecond.
WalterBright 3y ago
I played chess poorly because I'm lazy, so instead of thinking about my next move I'd think about writing a program to pick the move for me.
1-6 3y ago
I bet modern day go players have become more stereotypical in their moves. The only parallel I can draw is from professional Starcraft players who stopped doing very exotic moves because it’s usually blocked by players who’ve seen them all.
ordu 3y ago
Michael Abrash in his Graphics Programming Black Book described something similar with regard to optimization. People become stuck at some point, when they confuse "it is good enough" with "it is the best possible result". But if some event made them seriously doubt that it is the best possible result they could do wonders, like going from "this is the fastest code possible" to making it 10x faster. Just knowing that you could do better is a big deal, but if you have an AI showing you how to do better, then further perfection will become inevitable.
- sandspar 3y ago
  Happens in sports. Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile in 1954. Before this it was thought to be impossible. Within 3 years, 16 other runners also broke the 4-minute barrier. Their equipment was the same as before; it was a mental thing. Arnold Schwarzenegger tells about a similar thing in weightlifting. Pat Casey broke the 500 lbs bench press record in 1956. Bench press records have since doubled, now exceeding 1,000 lbs in some categories.
  - stvltvs 3y ago
    To compare apples to apples, the raw world record (unaided by special equipment) is only 782 lbs, not over 1000. Your point is still a good one, just unnecessarily overstated because benching 782 lbs is damn impressive!
caligarn 3y ago
I wonder if the same thing is happening in chess.
tutfbhuf 3y ago
> A few months later Bannister was no longer the only runner to do a 4-minute mile. These days, high schoolers do it. Wait. I know where you are coming from, but this is simply not true.
veunes 3y ago
AI is incredible tool to get better in many fields

428 points by iNic 3y ago

This is the tip of the iceberg, right? It's foreshadowing AI helping experts become better. I can see it happening in a lot of creative fields, including software. Perhaps this is where it really pulls the experts from the juniors, because only experts will be able to judge whether the AI has helped him create something actually good.

asolove 3y ago
Go is a constructed game with a precise definition of the rules and victory. The real challenge with AI helping experts is whether it can correctly help them balance their own value function for what "better" means. And whether we can still train human experts who can think about that independently with good judgement, if we've automated away the things that beginners would normally do to train their judgement with black boxes that they can't interrogate. Will be interesting for sure.
gcanko 3y ago
It's exactly like the invention of agriculture. Not having to hunt for food gave more opportunities for intellectual pursuits because of having more free time.
- rwbt 3y ago
  I'm skeptical of this argument. It gave free time to some people i.e. the landed gentry but also created the toiling peasants and a hierarchical civilization.
  - choilive 3y ago
    Many other types of governance was enabled by the agricultural revolution, not just feudalism.
  - ohyes 3y ago
    Toiling peasants had more free time than we do today.
    - rwbt 3y ago
      Hunter gatherers had more leisure than farming peasants. Surely, one can spot the trend.
    - TulliusCicero 3y ago
      [citation needed]
    - ummonk 3y ago
      The amount of toiling they could do without dying was calorically limited. Having lethargy induced by a shortage of food doesn’t necessarily mean a preferable lifestyle.
    - brailsafe 3y ago
      Pfft, disagree. Got laid off a year ago and have had nearly 100% free time since
    - nicklecompte 3y ago
      "Who's going to teach those idle medieval peasants to read, Ben? Augustine-man?!"
    - TulliusCicero 3y ago
      As I understand it, this is largely inaccurate. People just read "days off" as "more time", even though peasant farmers would need to engage in a lot of labor around the farm or household even on "days off" (your cows and chickens don't care that you're on vacation). Of course people still do some chores today even on days off, but it's a lot less than you need to do on a farm, ask basically any farmer.
  - ravelfan 3y ago
    [flagged]
- rcxdude 3y ago
  No, it just meant you could support more people on the same amount of land. Non-mechanised agriculture is very labour-intensive compared to hunting.
jasonfarnon 3y ago
I can't think of any reason we should be so lucky that AI will have a ceiling somewhere between human "juniors" and human "experts"
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
Arrath 3y ago
Maybe I'm too small minded but I would love to see AI like this enhance...well, the AI in games in general. I long for the day where I no longer play Civilization or an RTS against AI that has perfect knowledge, or is given handicaps to allow it to be competitive.
- sandspar 3y ago
  Flight simulators are set to benefit from AI. Imagine talking to an AI Air Traffic Control that understands natural language. Imagine walking down the aisle of your plane and overhearing AI people's conversations.
gwern 3y ago
> It's foreshadowing AI helping experts become better. The humans are still way worse than the Go programs. People are still willing to pay them to play a game as entertainment. Are lots of people willing to pay you to do whatever it is you do even when AIs do it much better, out of sheer entertainment value & sentimentality? If they are willing to pay you in particular, how many other people like you are they also willing to pay for, and is that number much greater than or much less than the current number paid to do it?
- nottorp 3y ago
  People are also cheering for Usain Bolt or whoever is the speediest runner this year, in spite of being able to outrun him by simply getting into a car...
  - sandspar 3y ago
    I think about this at the gym. I feel very proud of myself when I can go from being 1% as strong as a front-end loader to being 1.1% as strong. The king of my gym, the most high status guy there, is up to maybe 3%.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      That 0.1% is a 10% for you which is great progress!
  - gwern 3y ago
    "If they are willing to pay you in particular, how many other people like you are they also willing to pay for, and is that number much greater than or much less than the current number paid to do it?" There are not many Usain Bolts out there: just one, as a matter of fact. Who is Usain Bolt #100? Or #1000?
    - nottorp 3y ago
      A good bunch of the people he beat were also paid.
LouisSayers 3y ago
I'd say GPT4 has definitely helped me become a better programmer - I'm able to ask it questions, learn how I can refactor my code better, or approach a problem in a way I might not have considered. It does hit its limits, but it's been so useful - it's a funny cycle of training AI and having it train us, a great symbiotic relationship.
veunes 3y ago
Absolutely! We're just beginning to scratch the surface of how AI can augment and enhance human expertise in various fields

akira2501 3y ago

The other possibility is that it destroyed the incidental dogma that tends to build up in these types of games and human activities. This is why I like the "hacker ethos" as much as I do, it tends to eschew things like "accepted" dogma in order to find additional performance that other people were just leaving on the table out of polite comfort.

JustLurking2022 3y ago
The dogma generally becomes accepted because it outperforms other known strategies. In a game like Go, that could previously take a while because there are so many possible follow-ups that it takes time to accumulate enough data on whether a new strategy is actually decisively better, or just worse but over-performing because it's less known. There's a big difference between those two and "the hacker ethos" will lead to a lot of the latter. However, now computers can simulate enough games to give a relatively high degree of confidence that a variation in strategy is truly better.
- Izkata 3y ago
  I don't know how it's developed since, but from what I remember that was how it started - the AIs weren't following the standard moves (joseki) that we'd built up over centuries and human players were thrown off by the nonstandard responses that were working better than expected.
  - foota 3y ago
    I wonder if AI could be built to continually adapt, so that instead of playing an optimal strategy, it instead chooses between various suboptimal strategies. If humans train to play against the optimal strategy, then maybe the AI could do better by playing in suboptimally but less expected ways.
    - mafuy 3y ago
      This is already happening. The point differences for sometimes huge deviations are minuscule, so it's worthwhile to have in one's repertoire. The same is mostly true for purely human games, too: These are trick moves.

dtnewman 3y ago

Just look to Chess. The top players today are way better than any of the greats before, because they can train against computers and know exactly where they failed. That said, because they've gotten so good, chess at the top levels is pretty boring... it's hard to come up with a unique strategy so players tend to be defensive. Lots of ties. On the other hand, chess is more popular than ever. It's huge in high schools. I see people playing it everywhere. I know that for me, I love being able to play a game and then view the computer analysis afterwards and see exactly what I did wrong (granted, sometimes a move can be good for a computer who will know how to follow through on the next 10 moves, but not necessarily good for me... but most of the time I can see where I made a mistake when the computer points it out). Side note: I play on LIChess and it's great. Is there an equivalent app for Go?

tptacek 3y ago
online-go.com
- anononaut 3y ago
  OGS is definitely the best server in the West. Deserves all patronage it gets and more. I wish the AGA was more supportive of it rather than KGS.
  - naet 3y ago
    KGS is still pretty great. OGS might be more accessible to new players with one click sign in and a better web app, but I think KGS has a higher population of true dan+ strength players, and has a stronger "culture" around community reviews and studying. It used to be even better, but there are less total people playing on KGS than the previous peak.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      I found the culture on OGS, particularly wrt moderation, to be pretty great (as a newcomer, and I exclusively play 9x9). I've read about KGS but I've never figured out how to engage with it. (I know it to be the OG, srs bzns venue, though).

yinser 3y ago

Computers were always going to be better at searching large trees, now they can help steer new heuristics for human players.

SonOfLilit 3y ago
I'm not sure a computer without search defeats the best human playing without any search, but I know it defeats 1dan players (very smart people who put in 5-10 years of deliberate practice) when they are allowed to use as much search as they are able.
- mafuy 3y ago
  In I believe it was the AlphaGo Zero paper, pure policy without tree search was estimated to be near pro level. KataGo is likely much better. I'm 3 dan (yet not smart) and I will definitely lose to it even with some handicap >:-(
  - SonOfLilit 3y ago
    Thanks. I remembered 1 dan, I didn't remember if regular or pro.

lvl102 3y ago

Pro players train with AI and you can often see “blue dot” moves in tournament settings.

anononaut 3y ago
It's become go broadcasting standard to show some AI bot's win/loss confidence percentage for a given board state. It was fascinating for a few years, but now I feel like it takes away from some of the magic of watching pro level play.

tptacek 3y ago

When you read Go strategy resources, you see a lot of things divided into what best practices were before AlphaGo and what they are now. It's a whole big thing. It is still the case, though, that AI dominates humans at Go; humans didn't get so creative about the game that they put AI back on its toes (though some did discover exploitable AI "strategy bugs").

pa7ch 3y ago
Agreed, but I still think humans should get a little more credit for winning against AI no matter how. Its a competitive game with very simple and clear rules. A hole in AI strategy is a hole, even if quickly patched! I am still so impressed that Lee Sedol beat Alpha Go 1 game out of 5 way back when AI made its breakout. I was sad he felt so sheepish afterward for losing. In hindsight, I think it was an amazing accomplishment even if today an AI could beat Shin Jin-Seo (#1 player) 100 out of 100 times!
paulcole 3y ago
This is true in Scrabble as well. When I was playing seriously there were strong players who played a ton over a board and had deep intuition about what made plays good and what made plays bad. In the late 1990s/ early 2000s there started to be a lot more in the way of computer simulation and analysis and some very strong computer players. One (general) example was that older players liked the idea of making longer plays using more tiles to "win" a race to the S and blank tiles (the best tiles in the bag). Computer simulations generally show that turnover (as this is called) isn't optimal and you're better off holding strong combinations of letters rather than playing them off hoping to draw something better. Now younger players are better than ever because all of their training came with the help of computer analysis and simulation. Of course in Scrabble a huge part of it comes down to just memorizing the words in the dictionary.
- cdelsolar 3y ago
  AI doesn't dominate people in Scrabble though. The best humans are better than the best AI.

Mtinie 3y ago

This supports with my hypothesis about human-created art, post-AI. People are deeply concerned about how their livelihoods and identities will survive the next few years. I get it, and while there’s certainly a level of existential dread that feels reasonable, I don’t see many people yet discussing what the visual arts industries will look like on the other side. If Go play is in any way a creative exercise—which I’ve heard it is— then I’m super interested to see the state of humans in the arts 24 months out from now.

jsheard 3y ago
There is a key difference in the way these models are trained - Chess and Go have clearly defined win conditions, so a model can be taught to explore the possibility space and try to reach victory by any means necessary, potentially with strategies which have never been seen before. With art on the other hand there is no objective measure of quality, so the models are instead taught to treat already existing art as the benchmark to strive towards, making them trite by nature. As I see it AI can absolutely find innovative solutions, but only if you can clearly and explicitly define the problem it needs to solve.
- Mtinie 3y ago
  I use diffusion models and other generative tools to give me inspiration for works. While these aren’t solutions, per say, the tools do help me define (and refine) my approaches and offer visual options to consider.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  With art on the other hand there is no objective measure of quality, so the models are instead taught to treat already existing art as the benchmark to strive towards, making them trite by nature. Isn't this reminiscent of the arguments that were made at the dawn of photography as an art form? Some were afraid that portraiture was finished as an art form, but we got Impressionism, Cubism, and a host of other innovative forms to take its place. Never mind that portraiture was not in fact killed by photography, nor was any other visual form. Others swore that cameras and film would never be valid implements of art, but they got awfully quiet when Adams and Weston and others showed up on the scene, and you don't hear much from them at all these days. If nobody was afraid of AI -- if nobody was screaming bloody murder about how urgent it was to stop it -- only then could we safely say that it will have no role or relevance in art.

zerocrates 3y ago

Just finally getting around to reading/finishing my copy of Seven Games by Oliver Roeder, which covers checkers, chess, go, backgammon, poker, Scrabble and bridge, and the efforts for computers winning/solving each. A common theme is the effects of the computers on the human players in elevating (but maybe also homogenizing) play.

matthest 3y ago

Entertainment is one industry that will survive post-AI. We're still going to want to watch humans play sports, music and video games. We're going to want to watch humans act, cook food, and make vlogs. The chess industry is growing rapidly, even though it has already been conquered by AI: https://www.einpresswire.com/article/649379223/chess-market-to-experience-strong-growth-during-the-forecast-period-2023-2030 https://www.einpresswire.com/article/649379223/chess-market-...

ultra_nick 3y ago
There are content farms in Facebook churning out fake grandkids for old folks to fawn over.
suyash 3y ago
That's the next one on the chopping block, wait till Sora and related services comes out, it's all going to be digitally generated and will look just as real so yes it will be content about humans but without human doing/creating much of it.
- tylerchilds 3y ago
  as both an engineer and an entertainer, perception is reality. on the one hand, a computer system could 1:1 recreate a stunt a human did and elevate it to a stunt a human couldn’t do. people witness entertainment to trick their minds, and the disbelief and astonishment in the human condition hinges on “there’s no way _i_ could do that” and once they know they literally could not have done it, they’re not impressed. they may pay to be fooled once, but never twice. there’s a market for what you’re talking about, but that space is b2b and not c2c, which is where entertainment money flows. tl;dr dollar for dollar, ai vs taylor swift, taylor swift wins every time, no contest.
  - hackable_sand 3y ago
    > they’re not impressed This is subjective. Impressive things impress. It can be the hand-drawn impossible stunts from the 30's, or a CGI stunt from 2019.

Lacerda69 3y ago

AI will force artists to learn how to draw perfect hands as every artwork with bad hands will be instantly flagged as generated.

Art9681 3y ago

When AI beats Go players, they roll up their sleeves and practice their passion and try to get better. When AI beats Hollywood...

Tenoke 3y ago
The reward in Hollywood and most professional fields is about who makes the best/most cost efficient product no matter what. If the same was true for chess or go then players would be using computer assistance in every top level game.
anononaut 3y ago
I see the point you're making, and well made, but I think it also highlights a distinction in problems between the two. In the case of go, people who want to play go are the main motivating force. In the case of movies, I don't give a damn about Hollywood, the money, the studios, the IP, the actors. I only care about the quality of the film. Maybe the autuer, if there is one. AI changing conceptions about chess or go is very different than generative Ai which can radically change the means of how something is produced. I'm still going to play go because I love it. Meanwhile, I would happily cut out film studios (as we know them) if it meant I got to watch quality cinema.

timetraveller26 3y ago

I watched the alpha go doc and it was really shocking to me when one of the top go players decided to retire because the game was meaningless now that computers could beat anybody. it's good seeing that that wasn't the case for all players.

Solvency 3y ago
i don't get it, this applies to every single game. you can't beat aimbots in fps, you can even rig any game bot to play perfectly. that's why you play against HUMANS.
- gensym 3y ago
  I enjoy rock climbing even though I'll never be as good as a monkey or a mountain goat.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    Yeah but the difference is that you were always worse than a monkey or a mountain goat. And those are all worse than someone riding a helicopter to the top. So you didn’t had to change your mindset in this regard ever. Imagine if you grow up where there are no monkeys, mountain goats or helicopter rides to the top. You never heard of them, they are not a thing in your world. And you put in hard work to become a very very good rock climber. You kinda fancy yourself an apex climber. Maybe your mate George is a bit faster than you sometimes, but sometimes you are faster than him. Sometimes Sarah beaths the both of you, but sometimes you beat her times. You are kinda up there with the bests as far as you know. And then suddenly someone brings a monkey to your rock climbing gym and the monkey smokes all of you. It climbs walls much better than you ever could. Now you have to adapt. Will you change your viewpoint and start seeing yourself as “best among humans” and keep competing like that? Or will you see yourself as “clearly outcompeted so badly I might even give up”? Some people will go one way, some the other way. And then the new generation will grow up with the knowledge of monkeys, and they all naturally will be only the first kind of people, who understand that they can’t be the best only best among their class. Go players had their “the first monkey shows up in the climbing gym” moment during our lifetime. That is why you see some of the players react like that. That is a very different world from rock climbing where everyone already knows about monkeys, and mountain goats and helicopter rides since forever. Every person currently climbing rocks started climbing with the existence of monkeys, mountain goats and helicopters already incorporated into their thinking way before they climbed their first wall.

intuitionist 3y ago

The blog doesn’t say anything about how this “decision quality” metric is calculated… but presumably it’s using very similar Go evaluation functions to the ones used in the superhuman AI players, right? I think it’s highly unsurprising that humans would improve by that metric — they’re learning from the machine, so of course the machine likes it. Also, most things in life are not two-player zero-sum games where you can construct an evaluation function and build a “decision quality” metric out of it. So I’m not sure what the takeaway should be in those cases.

SonOfLilit 3y ago
Computers are so much better than humans at Go that the metric for board evaluation applies better to human games than it does to computer games. Just as I'm better at evaluating code written by GPT than code written by senior developers. Otherwise you'd see players who don't train with computers winning in tournaments against those who do.
- intuitionist 3y ago
  Yeah, I don’t think the metric is wrong or bad, just that it’s not telling us anything special. Or maybe it’s telling us something about Go AIs (that the “insights” they have are human-comprehensible) but it’s not at all clear that this fully generalizes.
  - visarga 3y ago
    Of course it doesn't work that easy in other fields. Basically the go board is an environment, the the AI model learns by creating its experiences in the environment. This can be applied to other kinds of environment, such as code execution, simulation, video games, human-AI chat rooms or robots. But each environment has its own complexity and searching for good strategies can take a long time. It's the same with scientific research, got to validate the theory in the world.
  - SonOfLilit 3y ago
    It sounds from your analysis that "better as evaluated by AI" would be true even if it wasn't really objectively better. All I'm saying is that yes, it does mean objectively better in this case.

usgroup 3y ago

Can I rephrase this? "Professional Go players finally have a software good enough to beat them, as a result of which they got better by using the software".

ajkjk 3y ago
No? The article makes the point explicitly that they did not only get better by using the software; they're also better at playing moves the computer does not play.
- SonOfLilit 3y ago
  It makes the point that they learned not only by memorization. They still learned it by using the software.

kccqzy 3y ago

> Shin et al calculate about 40 percent of the improvement came from moves that could have been memorized by studying the AI. But moves that deviated from what the AI would do also improved, and these “human moves” accounted for 60 percent of the improvement. I don't often play Go myself but a number of my friends do. Among non-professional players, it is really common to see game play being not as exciting as before because there's now an easy way: just memorize and copy what the AI does. I don't doubt that professional players still have a ton of creativity, but a lot of non-pros don't really have too much creativity and the whole game becomes memorizing and replicating AI moves.

thomasahle 3y ago
> a lot of non-pros don't really have too much creativity and the whole game becomes memorizing and replicating AI moves. That makes no sense. After 10-20 moves you are surely in a position that has never been played before. How do you memorize moves after that?
- datameta 3y ago
  Perhaps sub-positions still repeat with some regularity? Meaning subsets of the board. I have never played Go however, I've only seen the board and read the rules.
  - mafuy 3y ago
    Absolutely so. There are corner patterns but also side patterns and other patterns; all of them are 'joseki', known and often played sequences. These can be memorized. But that's almost useless without understanding why these patterns are good. You still need to pick a pattern that works well with the rest of the board, in particular which conditions elsewhere on the board influence it (ladders, ko) and you need to know all the punishments for deviations. That's really difficult and often subtle, and it is where strong players as well as AI easily outplay someone who just mindlessly memorized patterns.
- hibikir 3y ago
  You'd be surprised. Joseki are corner shapes, which might interact with other corners in the medium to long run, but whose interactions are way too difficult for any human to understand well. Therefore, you have 4 corners, and it's quite likely that you'll see 4 joseki getting played in any game. Joseki sequences have been studied for a long time, so they can be relatively long: Say, 15+ moves of an avalanche joseki, memorized by both players, and that's just one corner. So even before computers were any good, you could still see pretty iffy players using memorized patterns in every corner for a total way past 20 moves.

idkdotcom 3y ago

Go is a finite search game. So each chess. Equating intelligence to being good as these games is as silly as equating intelligence to being good at solving differential equations. Computers have bested humans at solving differential equations for many decades now. Nobody said "gee humans are now stupid". AI, as a knowledge field, is biased in this notion that all it matters when it comes to intelligence is that computers beat humans at Go or Chess.

suyash 3y ago

It's just a little boost, AI will keep getting better and better at faster pace, humans will have to figure out a different strategy all together.

bravura 3y ago

1) I would really be interested in broad brush strokes to understand how go theory has expanded. 2) I really wish we could shake the ant-farm with chess and go Fischer random chess. There's something nice about not having to memorize openings.

bongodongobob 3y ago
At the same time, the familiarity of openings is nice. Imagine completely random WoW battlegrounds. Part of the fun is knowing the territory and strategies rather than having to make them up from scratch each game.
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
  WoW battlegrounds?

f_allwein 3y ago

„Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings“ Rilke, „The Beholder“ https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2009/11/man-watching-der-schauende-by-rainer.html?m=1 https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2009/11/man-watching-der-scha...

andrewstuart 3y ago

If I was a professional player of any sort of game that AI can play then I would never play against AI. Just be a human, play against other humans. Who cares what AI can do?

bongodongobob 3y ago
People who want to get better care. Everyone who plays chess uses AI to improve.
veunes 3y ago
In order to be better you need practice more, AI can be there for you all the time

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ummonk 3y ago

The article is misleading regarding the history of chess. Magnus excepted, most top players did adopt a more cold and calculating material-focused chess style that mimicked Deep Blue and subsequent chess computers. It was only with the success of AlphaGo and LC0 that top chess players have started playing a more creative playstyle again, playing various wing pawn advances, as well as being more willing to give up material for nebulous initiative or positional advantages.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

Seven years ago I took remote Go playing lessons from a South Korean professional player. I stopped after about 5 months and started using CS Pro Go on my iPad Pro and it has a nice teaching feature of rating every one of my moves so after a game I can see where my biggest mistakes were. This is different than pro players learning new surprising strategies, for me it is nice to use.

seoulmetro 3y ago

Is this a surprise? The best people at any craft learn from the people that beat them.

bobogei81123 3y ago

Back when I was a kid learning go, I was taught that the kick joseki (a standard sequence of moves, similar to chess opening) [1] is a bad move, and you were considered trolling (and the teacher would not be pleased) if you played a 3-3 invasion [2] during the opening phase. These are all vindicated thanks to the AI and played pretty commonly nowadays. AI definitely helped eliminate many dogma and myths in go. [1] https://senseis.xmp.net/?44PointLowApproach#toc6 https://senseis.xmp.net/?44PointLowApproach#toc6 [2] https://senseis.xmp.net/?33PointInvasion#toc2 https://senseis.xmp.net/?33PointInvasion#toc2

chewxy 3y ago
you have to admit that 3-3 invasion is pretty annoying to handle. AI is way too aggro and people are learning to be as aggressive.
falserum 3y ago
3-3 invasion takes teritory at the expense of influence (future potential). I think I improved a lot when I stopped 3-3ing (it opened up different style of game for me) Noobies love 3-3 (I definitely did), because it’s kind of simple and familiar move. (Especially at the start of the game, when board is empty, there is gadzilion of possibilities and most of them unknown and possibly risky) If not discouraging 3-3, I would still recommend starting without it, to learn that way of play (if for nothing else, to deal with 3-3 invasions)
lawn 3y ago
I'll suggest that a 3-3 invasion is still a bad move for amateurs because they don't follow it up correctly and it may hamper their learning.
- Wildgoose 3y ago
  Agreed. With a 3-3 you are trading away influence in favour of hard territory. AI is happy to do that very early because AI can effectively destroy influence. Human players need to learn to enter 3-3 at "the last possible moment". That requires judgement.

yieldcrv 3y ago

> After a few years, the weakest professional players were better than the strongest players before AI. The strongest players pushed beyond what had been thought possible. Human Instrumentality Project

baobabKoodaa 3y ago

I really enjoyed the upbeat positive outlook of the article. Unfortunately, as an ex poker pro, I find it hard to imagine that AI "lifts people up" in domains like games. Sandholm's bots pretty much destroyed poker.

sinuhe69 3y ago
Poker is all about “taking the emotion out of the game”, isn’t? In such cases, what can beat a machine? Doesn't a machine naturally have the best “poker face”?
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  The idea of "poker face" isn't really relevant as most people have a "good enough" pokerface. The idea of looking into your opponent's eyes and just feeling out what they have is something from movies, not real life (I'm sure you can find exceptions to the rule, but this is true in the general case). What can beat a machine? Another machine, sadly. We are well past the point where machines surpasses humans in most poker variants.

WalterBright 3y ago

A new species arrives on the chess plain. Humans learn and adapt.

sandspar 3y ago
I could see AI being similar to the domestication of wolves. Humans encounter superior species, we co-opt the species to both species' benefit. Maybe AI would benefit from keeping us around. For example, we could test paths for it. Keeping a suboptimal pet like us for testing eliminates weak strategies, like a QA team finding bugs. It strengthens approaches by exposing flaws early.
veunes 3y ago
AI actually does the same... learns and adapts
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I know. It will decide our fate in a microsecond.

WalterBright 3y ago

I played chess poorly because I'm lazy, so instead of thinking about my next move I'd think about writing a program to pick the move for me.

1-6 3y ago

I bet modern day go players have become more stereotypical in their moves. The only parallel I can draw is from professional Starcraft players who stopped doing very exotic moves because it’s usually blocked by players who’ve seen them all.

ordu 3y ago

Michael Abrash in his Graphics Programming Black Book described something similar with regard to optimization. People become stuck at some point, when they confuse "it is good enough" with "it is the best possible result". But if some event made them seriously doubt that it is the best possible result they could do wonders, like going from "this is the fastest code possible" to making it 10x faster. Just knowing that you could do better is a big deal, but if you have an AI showing you how to do better, then further perfection will become inevitable.

sandspar 3y ago
Happens in sports. Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile in 1954. Before this it was thought to be impossible. Within 3 years, 16 other runners also broke the 4-minute barrier. Their equipment was the same as before; it was a mental thing. Arnold Schwarzenegger tells about a similar thing in weightlifting. Pat Casey broke the 500 lbs bench press record in 1956. Bench press records have since doubled, now exceeding 1,000 lbs in some categories.
- stvltvs 3y ago
  To compare apples to apples, the raw world record (unaided by special equipment) is only 782 lbs, not over 1000. Your point is still a good one, just unnecessarily overstated because benching 782 lbs is damn impressive!

caligarn 3y ago

I wonder if the same thing is happening in chess.

tutfbhuf 3y ago

> A few months later Bannister was no longer the only runner to do a 4-minute mile. These days, high schoolers do it. Wait. I know where you are coming from, but this is simply not true.

veunes 3y ago

AI is incredible tool to get better in many fields