[tel]

I think from a technological perspective there's very little question that AlphaGo could play ko. I would have imagined that AlphaGo would be better at ko than most human players since it's a question of balancing risk across the entire board. Human players might be more likely to be exhausted and choose suboptimally by the calculation deciding between different stakes on the board, but MCTS will correctly optimize for the long term potential of each major branch in the game tree.

So I'd be very surprised if that turns out to be the trick. Things that are hard for human players are not at all necessarily AlphaGo's weaknesses.

[edanm]

Don't have the link offhand, but I read on Reddit that Lee Seedol and a few other Go professionals pulled an all-nighter coming up with ways to beat AlphaGo, and one of their guesses was that AlphaGo would be bad at Ko's. I think the reasoning was because that hadn't happened in the games, so they assumed it was avoiding them.

[pixl97]

>so they assumed it was avoiding them.

I think us humans made a critical error in that line of thinking.

It didn't avoid ko because of the risk of loss.

It avoided ko because of the lack of strategic win.