
AlphaGo given honorary 9 dan rank by Korean Baduk Association - awwducks
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/googles-alphago-gets-divine-go-ranking
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Wintamute
I love the spirit with which the Baduk Association, and human Go players in
general are taking this. A spirit of competition and respect. To think that,
in defeat, an organisation of a human game thousands of years old would award
their highest honorary title to an AI? Bodes well for human/machine relations.
Perhaps we will see them more as precocious and gifted children, than
competetors, in who's strong arms we shall be protected later in life :)

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RBerenguel
In Korea they also started using the equivalent of Sensei to refer to the AI
after game 3 (or 2, not sure). A friend of mine lived there for a while,
playing a lot of go with professionals (taught English, learnt Korean and
worked remotely) so he knows the vibe there for that.

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starshadowx2
AlphaGo is also now the second ranked player in the world by WHR ratings. Lee
Sedol is #5.

[http://www.go4go.net/go/players/rank](http://www.go4go.net/go/players/rank)

[http://www.goratings.org/](http://www.goratings.org/)

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ilaksh
I wonder when Ke Jie will play AlphaGo.

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starshadowx2
I'm really looking forward to seeing that.

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iaw
I suspect that with time Lee may be able to even out the advantage. It would
be surprising if AlphaGo hadn't be trained on historic matches with Lee giving
him an early edge until Lee can adapt.

Probably one of the most exciting achievements in AI in a little while.

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Beldur
At the press conference after the 4th game it was mentioned that AlphaGo was
not trained on professional games at all.

They used strong amateur player games from public archives.

It was also mentioned that AlphaGo needs millions of games to be trained. Even
if they added a few hundred Lee Sedol games, the impact would be very small.

~~~
bainsfather
You are correct. They used the large number of amateur games from the KGS Go
server.

By the way, AlphaGo has a wikipedia page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo)

And the Nature paper is:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/nature16961.html)
(paywalled, but scihub can get it for you). The paper is fairly readable, and
worth having a look at if you are interested in this topic.

