I mean, that's like asking whether marathon runners have a future now that we've got cars. Exercising one's brain/having pleasure through the game could be an end in itself, and is independent of how machines perform.
Take it from someone that walked the path of becoming a professional Go player, being a professional and an amateur are completely different attitudes towards the game.
Tic Tac Toe is solved, but can be fun to play when you are a kid. Amateur Go playing can still exist, but the goal of strength is more instilled in the path to pro-ship.
This really suggests that going the path of being the strongest is no longer sensical. Why would a human try to be the best calculator in the world, knowing it will never beat any calculator ever? Just to prove itself to other human caculator wannabes? Senseless.
This is a real paradigm shift and we still need to understand what to do. But obliviously ignore AlphaGo is akin should be unfathomable for a professional aspiring player.
As a professional, the first question to ask is what will AlphaGo bring to Go Theory. We still dont know how much stronger it is than Lee Sedol (or how far it is from "God"). Pushing it to its limits will show us insights we havent found yet and we will update ourselves as players to the most current theory.
The second step is answering the following question: Can human + AlphaGo beat Alpha Go?
A human potentiated with AlphaGo's reading power can intuitively pick variations that would give it an edge? If so, we have found that Go still harbors a human secret that is jsut overly compensated by reading.
The last step would be, even if human participation gives negligible results, can human + Alpha Go create better games than Alpha Go?
And yet in chess the Carlsens, Nakamuras, Caruanas, Svidlers etc of the world still compete while knowing they have no chance of beating StockFish running on a modern desktop.
The super GMs of the world - and basically all of the chess loving public with them - seem to have acknowledged it and moved on; why would such a transition be impossible in Go?
I cannot speak for Chess's mindset but as a Devoted Go Player, we are collectively trying to solve it, and so we have for centuries. We play Go to explore its universe and reach utmost understanding of the game(and a glimpse of ourselves). If we ever find(which eventually we shuold) the exact single pattern that is best for both players, and we solve the game, it becomes something different. Maybe it becomes something senseless, or something artful(I can explain the 'art' part if someone asks) but trying to be competitive is silly.
If I devoted my life to Go today, I would not aim at becoming better competing, I'd have to aim at a more effective way to solve the game. Competing was the only thing we had to figure out what was best, but now we can have a companion that will prevent us from faulty variations and logic, and give us instant validation. We can discover more fuseki with a focus group and AlphaGo in a month than in a decade of tournaments.
Competing for the sake of competing is a petty goal.
> Competing for the sake of competing is a petty goal.
This makes me much more angry than it probably should. Who are you to decide what is or what is not a petty goal? People will always do what they enjoy, and if they enjoy competition then that is what they will do. There is nothing wrong or petty about that.
Its a petty goal because the only thing you want to do is be better than the others. In the end, only 1 person is right, and the only consolation is that others are worse for you. Its also not representative of Go, you can be competitive in eating sausages. If your only reason to play Go is to compete, your contribution to the Go community is marginal
With respect to Checkers (specifically, the 8x8 English Draughts variant), it's been a solved game as of last decade, and people still play in tournaments. I don't think it's that silly, since there are many techniques we've automated away, yet still practice by hand.
"[...]we are collectively trying to solve it, and so we have for centuries. We play Go to explore its universe and reach utmost understanding of the game(and a glimpse of ourselves)."
Is there a literature available in English that explores this attitude/practice? It sounds most interesting. You seem to derive significant meaning from the game and I'm interested in how groups of people find meaning in collective activities.
This is more of an insight you get about Go Life, not something we "All know and agree of". Hikaru No Go was a manga that talked a bit about the purpose of playing Go, about being connected with Go players since time immemorial, trying to get perfect play, and failing but getting better each generation.
This is a professional or go devotee mindset, not a typical amateur player that plays without the intent of changing Go Theory or making a legacy.
Why would you do so? The computer will advance much, much quicker than you will because it doesn't have to memorize or be inefficiently trained to be good at Go. It will be able to solve things better than you will, and one day the game will be solved and truly pointless.
Anything that Go has to go through as a result of AlphaGo, Chess has already gone through with Stockfish and its predecessors (such as Deep Blue, though I realize it's not exactly the same).
Is there a particular reason why a chess computer would be any more undefeatable than a Go computer? Even though Kasparov lost, Nakamura destroyed Rybka 10 years later. Now that we have a competitive Go AI, isn't it likely the game of Go will shift and be even more competitive since now more players can get world-class practice and suggestions on their own?
If I understand AlphaGo correctly, I don't think that any human in the future will be able to beat the AlphaGo today. AlphaGo didn't beat Lee Sedol because it played new and marvelous moves we need to understand.
It played better because it knew the exact consequences of the options it was presented, and could calculate it and make better decisions than human intuition. No human can develop that reading power, and its not reasonable to think a human in the future will have intuition that beats the calculation of AlphaGo.
Since reading, the core ability of Go can now be completely replaced by a computer, the question is what others decisions can a player make. Can he make strategic decisions better than AlphaGo? Can intuition still best AlphaGo calculating capacity?
Eventually, we can think that we will have computational power to actually solve Go, and if there is any sense at all to play Go after that, its about finding those beautiful games, from beginning to end, that provoke emotions and turn Go purely into art.
Eventually everything we do will be done better by technology. Why should anyone do anything? I think the experience is worthwhile in and of itself and I look forward to what AI can teach us about the game.
I like that analogy a lot! It's not like "playing Go really well" ever solved any real-world problem, it has always been a competition among humans. What should change, there?
I feel like the author completely misunderstood why AlphaGo is exciting. It's about advancements in technology and soft AI, Go has almost nothing to do with it.
Well, we're on hackernews, we like the tech stuff. For most of the world, this news is where people learn about Go and the human player's "humiliation" (whether or not the Go community sees it that way) is the story.
I'd argue, though, that this is merely a proof of deep learning being able to solve "hard" problems. There's headlines everywhere about deep learning solving previously "impossible" image recognition problems, for example. Fields that are much more interesting and relevant in their real-world impact. AlphaGo, in comparison, seems like a PR/pet project. It mostly exists to play Go really well. It's a sub-branch of uses of the technology, not a start.
>Well, we're on hackernews, we like the tech stuff. For most of the world, this news is where people learn about Go and the human player's "humiliation" (whether or not the Go community sees it that way) is the story.
In that regard, Lee Sedol has done the game of Go a great service by being so gracious in defeat (and for once, the media headlines actually mirror his humility and maturity). That has actually been my lasting impression from the match.
Maybe that's why AlphaGo is exciting to you. I don't give a shit about technology and AI compared to how much I want to watch AlphaGo play more games of Go, and I suppose that professionals probably feel the same way.
we're slowly moving towards anticipation in continuous strategy games, and life. progressively better decisions/anticipation in progressively much much larger decision space is how this is relevant
It's worth noting that human brain consuming barely 20 watts of power is competing against giant computing infrastructure gobbling up perhaps few 100 killowatts. It's like one player against the army of 5000 players. Many people write off this energy requirements as non-consequential but the fact is that our major technological bottleneck of 21st century is nothing BUT energy consumption. When we have machine that consumes 20 watts and does everything that human brain does, it would be a day for a new species.
>"I mean, that's like asking whether marathon runners have a future now that we've got cars."
I don't think they are the same things.
Marathon is about the physical limit of human beings, while Go is about mental limit.
Before there are cars, or trains, we all know we are not the fastest in the world. A rabbit can easily overrun an adult human.
However, we never thought that a dog or a bird will beat us in a game like GO. Thinking a machine beating the human champion in the game of GO, is like admitting that we are intelligently inferior to machines.
Not really, speaking specifically about marathon, humans should rank pretty high in the list of the best marathon species. We're up there with horses and I guess wolves.
That's a better statement of my own version, which has been: Now that we have bulldozers and cranes, is there any point to getting physically stronger?
Read the first paragraph. Sounds like the students in the story are forgoing most other learning to be great Go players. There's a big difference in their level of dedication. Does Go still remain as exciting of a sport?
If Chess is any indicator, the ebb and flow of popularity of such games are more dependent on the persona and narratives of their champions and championship matches rather than any existence of a machine superior in skill to its human counterparts.s
Does that mean that marathon runners will no longer be in regular use in industry, and be relegated to special events justified in part by aesthetics, and also by audience spectacle?
Likewise, if machines can do quality accounting, does that mean that accounts will be relegated to special accounting events, just like there are marathon events, where people come for aesthetic enjoyment or audience spectacle?
IMO the analogy is correct for Go players as that's mostly a "sport".
There's real cases of similar technology putting people out of jobs, for example I recently read that more and more finance firms more or less completely automate a lot of processes, even those where you'd traditionally would have counted on people's "gut feelings". Deep learning is eerily good at simulating "gut feelings".
There are certainly mathematics competitions, where humans (usually high-school or college-age students) participate and cheer on other humans who are artificially restricted from the use of a calculator. And these competitions are considered useful because the skills required to do well on them are very valuable in certain industries, even if the artificial restriction on calculators is removed. In fact, some of the companies that most aggressively hire people who perform well at these competitions are also well-known for automating accounting tasks that were done by humans until recently, such as determining the expected price of a stock.
This really suggests that going the path of being the strongest is no longer sensical. Why would a human try to be the best calculator in the world, knowing it will never beat any calculator ever? Just to prove itself to other human caculator wannabes? Senseless.
This is a real paradigm shift and we still need to understand what to do. But obliviously ignore AlphaGo is akin should be unfathomable for a professional aspiring player.
As a professional, the first question to ask is what will AlphaGo bring to Go Theory. We still dont know how much stronger it is than Lee Sedol (or how far it is from "God"). Pushing it to its limits will show us insights we havent found yet and we will update ourselves as players to the most current theory.
The second step is answering the following question: Can human + AlphaGo beat Alpha Go? A human potentiated with AlphaGo's reading power can intuitively pick variations that would give it an edge? If so, we have found that Go still harbors a human secret that is jsut overly compensated by reading.
The last step would be, even if human participation gives negligible results, can human + Alpha Go create better games than Alpha Go?