
Impact of Go AI on the professional Go world - apetresc
https://medium.com/@hajinlee/impact-of-go-ai-on-the-professional-go-world-f14cf201c7c2
======
hcnews
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).

~~~
i-am-curious
What's the incentive to master a game already beaten by AI?

~~~
SamBam
What is the incentive to run faster, when a car can drive faster, or build
strength when a tractor can lift more?

What is the incentive to do any artistic endeavor, if you are not planning on
being one of the world's best pianists, or painters, or singers, or furniture-
makers?

Go was probably already solved by some distant species on a planet far away.
Did that make it any less enjoyable for us to play? What's the difference?

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nopinsight
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
This is interesting and doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't learn good form
just by playing a good opponent.

~~~
comboy
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
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.

~~~
comboy
People I know that went studying go to Asia had output from their teachers
likely worse than you get from the program given the language barrier and
general approach. It was about playing games with strong players (playing
different styles, which I admit may teach a bit more than Alpha) and having
teacher to point you which of your moves were bad and what to do instead (and
that's it, only seeing some sequences and hearing "good", "bad"). Because
knowing how and when you lost the game is huge. And doing shitloads of go
problems of course.

That said, it still may be worth having a teacher/trainer I guess. To motivate
you, give you that dopamine in person and all that jazz.

I would say it's more like learning to code yourself rather than at the
university than learning assembly from gcc.

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

~~~
morelisp
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?)

~~~
k4tz
Could you explain the Kurt Cobain statement? Not being snarky, just unfamiliar
with what you're referencing.

~~~
webmaven
_> Could you explain the Kurt Cobain statement? Not being snarky, just
unfamiliar with what you're referencing._

I believe they are saying that Cobain's work (and the popularity of Grunge
generally) brought new life to the Rock music scene, leading to an uptick in
garage bands forming (and therefore demand for music lessons?) as a second
order effect.

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iandanforth
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
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
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
The computer makes the tactical blunders very clear.

For strategic/positional issues, it is not nearly as good a teacher.

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umvi
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)

~~~
mlyle
> instead of localizing go jargon like the chess community has done,

Yah, we never say Zugzwang or J'adoube or Desperado or En Passant or
Fianchetto or Zwischenzug.

There's not so many foreign words to learn to understand Go compared to chess.
For lots of the fundamental Go words, they'd need a new English word coined
anyway or an imperfect metaphor.

~~~
dmurray
> For lots of the fundamental Go words, they'd need a new English word coined
> anyway or an imperfect metaphor.

This. Even the chess words that are anglicised have special meanings in chess.
Being a native speaker of English doesn't help you understand what a "Bishop"
is or what is "Checkmate" (OK, that's an anglicised Persian word) or the
difference between a "Pin" and a "Skewer".

Also, most of the Japanese terms don't have a meaning outside Go, so it's not
like Japanese people get a leg up there.

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_acco
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
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
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
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.

~~~
elcritch
Much of human creativity is likely linked to some sort of Bayesian analysis,
but it also can happen based on limited sample sets and unseen situations. As
you point out, the Alpha Go likely just saw that scenario out of millions of
random scenarios never explored by humans before. Given the enormous compute
resources used, it's possible AlphaGo has made more Go moves than all of
humanity ever combined.

Reminds me of a quip about Richard Feynman that he'd spend many hours honing a
new way of doing a physics problem, but carefully present it as if he just did
it off handed. So we just need to link human brains with cybernetic implants
to compete. ;)

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Cd00d
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
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
      }

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hoytech
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.

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joerickard
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/)

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suyash
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
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
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
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.

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danbmil99
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
>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
Nerdy but true

