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by an_opabinia 1796 days ago
> alpha go is special

The VC community is in denial about how much Go resembled a problem purpose built to be solved by deep neural networks.

1 comments

Are you suggesting that Go literally was purpose built for this?
There is a sense in which it was: out of all the games that have ever been designed, or that it would be logically possible to design, humans selected Go as one of the relatively few to receive sustained attention, in part because it is particularly well suited to the deep neural network that is the visual cortex. So it is not a coincidence that it is also well suited to artificial deep neural networks.
It’s one of the few interesting games out there whose rules can be neatly represented as algebra on binary matrices and still make sense.