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by helpfulmountain 943 days ago
There is no chance that humans can beat the best Go AI anymore, since the paradigm of AlphaZero (which was trained in the absence of human game records, and beat the version which beat Lee Sedol essentially 100-0)

It is unlikely, also, that a committee of players would be significantly better than a single master, due to lack of coherence -- but that's an interesting idea! I wonder if a committee of the top 100 go players playing a game by vote could beat someone in the top 10 more than 20-0 or something; i doubt it -- it might even go the other way (that the single player would win the series)

I don't think this counts as the real "start of the singularity" because Alphazero was not able to (or capable of) altering its own algorithm, but rather just adjusting its weights.

Something more akin to being in the long march toward general AI.

As a personal note the whole issue of large LLM's capacity for intelligence, beauty, humanity, morality, logic, etc etc was softened in my mind and heart by witnessing with rapt attention this epochal shift in computing.

I had held Go up as a paragon of human brilliance and beauty -- to see that standard fall was a complex process of grief and discovery for me, which I feel has better prepared me for understanding and appreciating the emergence of LLMs

3 comments

It has been tried in chess at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World
This is a different kind of setup. I'm not sure if the idea of 2-3 super GMs able to consult with one another has been tried but given the estimated rating difference I doubt it would matter. The difference is estimated around 800 points, or the difference between a strong untitled player and Magnus.
Like many other crafts and arts where machines can do better, Go has a deeper role in being transformative for the human learning it -- in the case of Go, developing strategic thinking, being able to make decisions balancing long term and short term gain, uniting reasoning and intuition, an arena for exercising emotional equanimity.

Winning, I think, is secondary to this. It's a useful measure of how one has progressed in that transformation, but I think the lessons and principles from Go that I can apply in guiding my my day-to-day life are more valuable.

4-vs-1 games have been played by the strongest players in my club. They say it added around one stone of strength.