| Ladders are a thing so easy that its literally in this beginner series of tutorials. Its a thing that 30kyu beginners learn and master. Its very strange to me that AlphaGo / AlphaZero was unable to ever learn ladders. It shows that the way humans learn and AIs learn is quite different (or at least, MCTS + Neural Net machines learn differently). Yes, Go is a strategic game of patterns and perhaps we humans overemphasized the ladder. Nonetheless, its a concept that humans can see and calculate with reasonable speeds that the (earlier) AI was unable to do (and now we've built stronger AIs that can prove this weakness). --------- This 100% makes the 2016-era discussions about the "strategic brilliance" of AlphaGo come up into question. Now that KataGo is superior (ie: MCTS+NeuralNets + dedicated Ladder Solver), we need to double-check all those "strategically brilliant" moves with the newer AI and see if a ladder messed with them. Etc. etc. The things AlphaGo sees aren't necessarily useful to us humans, nor are they useful to modern AI-levels of Go. They're just... that. Trapped in 2016. There should not be any great mystery assigned to the 2016 era game, aside from it being a pivotal moment for AIs. The game itself is now suspect, now that we know all of AlphaGo's flaws. As Go players, we have better things to study. |