[nullnilvoid]

> what is the point of being a professional in something a computer will just be better.

Chess was conquered by computers a long long time (in computer time) ago and the popularity of chess has only gone up, not down. There are many professionals making a living out of chess. The art of Go will live on for sure.

[conanbatt]

From a professional standpoint, thats pretty terrible.

Sure, Catan is also easily solvable, but its played for fun.

When you play as a professional you make a commitment to the board, to advance and explore the frontiers of the universe contained in the game. If the bot explores better than you every single time, you are just dedicating your life to trying to beat a calculator at arithmetics.

[saulrh]

It's become a sport, with all that that implies. Training and supporting an olympic sprinter is a multi-million dollar investment. But olympic sprinters haven't been the fastest mode of travel in centuries. If all you want to do is go fast, you buy a really fast car or an aircraft and you go fast. But simply going fast isn't what the sport is about. It's about pushing humans to their limits and seeing what humans can do. It's a race. And chess has become the same. If you just want to win at chess, you ask a computer. But if you want to play a game of chess, or watch a game of chess, it's all about the humans.

[conanbatt]

I agree with this point, but to me its a degradation of the game. It degrades into a sport.

Go has something amazing about how we study pattenrs that are 100's of years old. Many current and active training materiels have up to 400 years old!

Go is something were each generation looks at the previous one and builds on that, and its been a very old and iterative process. If go becomes an exercise by how little we lose to machines for, its a major degradation of the purpose of continuing that history.

As a pro, you are just working towards the inevitable goal of solving the game, and then we are all free to never play that damn game ever again :)

[saulrh]

That is something to mourn, yes. It is in some way disappointing to see such an old culture, one that's been the focus of so much effort, be overtaken and undercut by newcomers that don't have that culture. It's interesting, though; in topics that lives depend on, medicine and industry, we celebrate the advent of new techniques that remove the burden and dependence on the old guard. Like you said, "Free to never play that damn game ever again". But in this case, where the mastery of the game is the end in itself instead of a means to some other end...

I don't know. My perspective is likely decidedly odd, as I've read a great deal of far-future science fiction and done AI research and have already spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be human when machines will inevitably outperform us all in every way. The key, I think, is that there still are - will always be - things for us to enjoy. We can always find achievement in our own accomplishments, even if they're insignificant next to what someone or something else can do. I don't care that I run slower than a supercar; I take satisfaction in being able to run faster than I could yesterday. Not all is lost. :)

[EGreg]

As Kasparov said, people still have foot races even though cars are faster.

Having said that, it's much easier to see someone is on foot than to know someone isn't cheating in a chess tournament every few moves.

As for computers letting new kids on the block overtake old cultures, look at the black cab in London being overtaken by Uber. They have "The Knowldge" and Uber has a GPS.

[wiz21c]

My gut feeling is that Go is a technique if you put it in the perspective of winner/looser. If you put in it in the perspective of cultural legacy, apprenticeship, etc. then it's more of an art. The technique can be beaten by computers, but the art is what humans do of go, so it can't be beaten.

Moreover, as OP says, there are subjects where machine are absolutely nowhere and those subjects already do matter : world peace, ethics, etc. These are so human... Even if you had a world of machines (à la matrix), these questions would be of the utmost importance to us humans because that's an emanation of what we are.

[danielbarla]

Honestly, unless the rate of progress of technology changes, the topics you mention will not be machine-less for too long. It's relatively easy to imagine a general artificial intelligence (however far off in the future that may be), that can out-think us on the topics of world peace and ethics. Unless you reject the very possibility of a true general artificial intelligence (or assert some kind of metaphysical superiority of our biological existence), the list of things we're truly best at gets smaller and smaller.

[jules]

The game was combinatorial search from the start, so you could argue that it did not degrade the game, but it dispelled the illusion that it was deeper and something more than a sport.

[conanbatt]

I agree, but there still might be a frontier where humans are better than computers here, that computers are making up with computational power.

If humans + computer beat computer, id feel pretty content as a human being.

Eventually if the game is computationally solved that will dispel,but wouldnt that happen with basically everything?

[jules]

Computers will undoubtedly become so good that computer + pro human would be like pro human + amateur, where the amateur has the final say about which move to make. The best strategy is to just do what the computer says.

[guscost]

Go's difficulty comes from predicting a future game state, which is discrete and highly multiplicative. Novice players play on smaller boards. So humans are definitely going to lose to (relatively) simple discrete computation machines.

For professionals, finding usable strategies will still be a challenge, since unassisted humans are still far from solving Go or Chess. Unassisted humans have been pretty much kicked out of the top leagues, though.

[Noos]

It winds up making humans into race horses though, ultimately pointless but done so long as there remains some irrational mystique or cultural admiration for the practice. When there isn't, like bullfighting, the sport dies out.

[nullnilvoid]

At least right now, computers explore the frontiers of the universe only if we humans tell them to. They explore the way we program them to. If I want to explore the frontiers of Go, I would not care about winning or losing. I would enjoy the art, the beauty, and the philosophy of Go.

[SamBam]

Do you think there's no point in bettering the mind?

I don't know whether mastering Chess or Go makes you a better thinker or not, but it certainly might, and many people think it does.

So if you become a better human thinker than you were before, who cares if a machine can still beat you at the game? It's for your own growth.

A machine is probably also better and sitting and thinking of nothing, but lots of people will still meditate.

[conanbatt]

Is the practise of a sport worth it?

Fundamentally, this is a question of human identity. If bots are better than us at everything, what is the purpose of anything? What would we do?

[andrepd]

I'm curious, how is Catan easily solvable if it has an element of social communication (indeed the most important part of the game)?

[sanderjd]

That struck me as well, but thinking about it a bit more, I could see there being a set of correct decisions in trading, which could be taken as assumptions. I'm not sure such a set exists, but after playing a good deal of Catan, I think they might. In a game where everyone knows what they're doing, the trades are very predictable, and it's pretty clear when someone has made a dumb trade. It seems like there are still too many unknowns to consider it "solvable", but it seems less open ended than poker, for instance.

[conanbatt]

Only in person, if you play catan online there's no discussion, showing you that trading can also be modeled.

Sure, there is some sales skill there, but strong catan players dont need to discuss anything :)

[stouset]

That might be why you would choose to play as a professional. Clearly, those who continue to play chess as a profession do so for other reasons.

That said, humans still contribute heavily. Computers may calculate a position as advantageous to one side or another, but it takes a human to explain why in heuristic terms that others can use to evaluate similar positions.

[conanbatt]

Well, to nitpick, the reason anyone becomes professional is to make money, kind of by definition.

Go has something of a higher order attached, its not a sport, its a philosophy of life. Its a way to devote yourself to an art. What you do with that contribution is very important.

We could build robots that paint more and better than what we do, but as humans we are very likely to still be able to produce things computers dont. The great question is if that is true with Go as well, or effectively, its a purely tactical game and all our philosophy, ideas and beauty appreciation is basically a projection of a silly life-form over appreciating tic-tac-toe.

[espadrine]

> We could build robots that paint more and better than what we do, but as humans we are very likely to still be able to produce things computers dont.

I expect this to be the next big human activity where machines consistently beat humans within ten years.

We already have neural networks that can apply a painting style; creating a new style, and impacting a political or sentimental meaning to a painting, will soon be within grasp.

To quantify it, I offer a Turing-like test that I expect to be beat within ten years: there will be a machine-generated work of art that will be sold higher than human-made ones at an auction in which there are both human and machine works of art, but where nobody in the room knows which is which.

[Magnusmaster]

After seeing what passes for "art" at MoMA, I wouldn't be surprised if a painting made by a neural network today were sold higher than a human-made one at an auction.

[bdamm]

Pieces at that auction may be worth more specifically because of the auction and the mystique of the times.

[apk17]

> Well, to nitpick, the reason anyone becomes professional is to make money, kind of by definition.

The definition only includes the making money part, not the reason. Many people do take money for what they do simply so they can do it full time.

[gizmo686]

>We could build robots that paint more and better than what we do.

For some definition of paint. Namely, if you give it an image created by a human; and call the computer a printer. We are nowhere near computers creating art at the quality of humans.

>The great question is if that is true with Go as well, or effectively, its a purely tactical game and all our philosophy, ideas and beauty appreciation is basically a projection of a silly life-form over appreciating tic-tac-toe.

Is this even a question? Go is a combinatorical game. There is a solution; one of the two players has a winning strategy. The only question we are facing is if it is feasible for us to find the winning strategy (a question which AlphaGo does not help us answer). With sufficient computational power, finding the winning strategy is trivial.

[Radim]

"With sufficient computational power, the whole universe is a trivial simulation."

Sometimes, a difference in quantity is a difference in quality :-) P=NP and all that.

It feels like you're talking past each other. Conanbatt says Go will never feel the same to humans, especially humans who see Go as the purpose, the "main course", of their life. Some fundamental psychological quality is lost.

You're saying that people enjoy doing even silly, "pointless" (sic!) things for a living, like playing sports. And that you can actually make great money doing that. Money and economy are human constructs, "for monkeys by monkeys", not a physical law.

I don't see any contradiction there.

[conanbatt]

> We are nowhere near computers creating art at the quality of humans.

This can change very quickly. Already google's machine learning with images created a sensation like a modern-day surrealist. There is technology that produces novel classical music that has been deemed undistiguishable from a human performance.

> Is this even a question? Go is a combinatorical game. There is a solution

Everything has a solution. There are no dice. With enough information you can choose what to roll everytime. With enough information you can have all the potential conceivable paintings. Perception is a combinatorial game. Physics is a combinatorial game.

Its more of a quest of identity: what can we do that bots cant, and why, and once we understand it we move on to the next thing, until we figure out everything.

[zeptomu]

> There are no dice. With enough information you can choose what to roll everytime. With enough information you can have all the potential conceivable paintings. Perception is a combinatorial game. Physics is a combinatorial game.

Small nitpick: Modern physics wants to have a word with you.

But I think I know what you want to say.

[albertzeyer]

> We are nowhere near computers creating art at the quality of humans.

The same was said about playing Go. I would be careful with such statements.

The only problem about art is that we don't have a good measure for it. And for all kind of measures you could think of, I bet that it's not that hard to train some computer to beat a human in that measure.

[viraptor]

> it takes a human to explain why in heuristic terms that others can use to evaluate similar positions.

That's not strictly true. With enough samples, or fast enough playing bots, you can explore that domain automatically. There are many different approaches from expert systems which are purely human heuristics to minmax which can be defined purely in terms of in-game points difference.

Why the situation is advantageous may be just "because enough Monte Carlo simulations starting with it end up winning".

[manigandham]

Because it's about humans...

Machines can be made to do better at just about any sport but we still have athletes because it's about human potential and competing within that regime, not pure unbounded scientific advancement. If that's what you want then there's plenty of opportunity to do so in academia rather than professional sports, and such pursuits coexist just fine.

[kusmi]

Easy, I would switch to studying the calculator.

[tartavull]

Isn't this more general than go? Would humans feel useless after an AI revolution?

[Noos]

chess is nowhere near as popular as it was in the 1980s, and chess clubs have been declining for some time.