[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.

[wiz21c]

It all depends on what AI machine you make. If I take a few artificially created billion neurons and group them into something very close to the brain, then, well I may have made an artificial AI, but it's so close to a human brain that it's not what we currently think of it. Heck, if I want to do that , I just need to have a few moments with someone of the other sex and I may make that machine.

That machine, could indeed think like us.

But if you think programs, neural networks and big data, I'ma afraid we are very far away of anything close to a machine than can think about ethics. Ethics is not a mathematical problem, it has to do with gut feelings, culture, bodies, etc. And I don't see anybody with the smallest idea on how to teach that to a computer, other than in very toyish way (such as a Tamagochi)

[danielbarla]

Currently (and prior to now), most of the research in AI went into immediately usable solutions; I myself ended up doing my MSc in what is effectively optimisation (using certain "AI" techniques), rather than what really interested me (which would have been "real AI"). In a sense, this is correct; we want to have real value out of research investment, so that side of AI will be ahead for a time. Basically, why have something that taught itself to play chess, when we can use a human-engineered heuristic that beats it every time?

That said, this line of thinking is coming under attack on several fronts. AlphaGo is a good example - it's tacking problems where we're not good enough at coming up with heuristics. So, essentially, we've hit a tier where machines are really better at that topic than we are. Think about that for a second; a computer is a better programmer than the best of our guys, and it's early days yet. Not just running computations, but actually determining what computations to run.

Problems like Go are complex enough that if you want to have AI be good at it, you actually need to invest in the meta-level goal creation and other things that go along with it. This is happening on many levels, and researchers are actively trying to understand how exactly the human brain handles these topics (or even what consciousness is, on a practical level).

If you follow these developments to their logical conclusion, I'm pretty sure a "real AI" will be on the cards relatively shortly, whatever that time period may be (100 years is nothing on the grand scale). Initially, this will likely have some architectural similarities to human brains, but will essentially be free to do its own thing and restructure. Eventually, it will have gut feelings and culture that are far beyond what our feeble little brains can comprehend.

[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.

[saulrh]

This has become the case in Chess [1]. However, it took 15 years for that to happen. Chess engines now are orders of magnitude stronger now than they were when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. So this is definitely the case, it'll just take a while.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/computers-beating-humans-at-a...

[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.