8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

by rayshanon 3/19/2024, 5:53 PMwith 79 comments

by trompon 3/19/2024, 7:06 PM

> Go is a deeply complex strategic game — famously far more complicated than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible board configurations.

The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much, or to be exact [1]:

208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935

Indeed far larger than the ~ 4.8 x 10^44 legal chess positions [2], that is in between the number of legal 9x9 and 10x10 Go positions.

[1] https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html

[2] https://tromp.github.io/chess/chess.htm

by bnprkson 3/19/2024, 8:05 PM

To my knowledge AlphaGo models never became meaningfully available to the public, but 8 years later the KataGo project has open source, superhuman Go AI models freely available and under ongoing development [1]. The open source projects that developed in the wake of AlphaGo and AlphaZero are a huge success story in my mind.

I haven't played Go in a while, but I'm kind of excited to try going back to use the KataGo-based analysis/training tools that exist now.

[1]: https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

by alas44on 3/19/2024, 8:55 PM

Google's documentary on AlphaGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

Truly a must watch! (just look at the video comments to be convinced)

by Pet_Anton 3/19/2024, 7:17 PM

I know there are Go channels in Korea for watching professional matches... are there any for watching AIs face off against each other?

by efrank3on 3/19/2024, 10:10 PM

I can't believe it's been 8 years.

by rhaps0dyon 3/19/2024, 7:48 PM

Great PR for Google from Lee! It totally isn't mostly for advancing Google's commercial interests, the bottom line being:

"I believe that humans can partner with AI and make great progress. As long as we can set clear principles and standards for it, I am quite optimistic about the future of AI technology in our daily lives."

I hope he got paid well.

by ArtTimeInvestoron 3/19/2024, 7:02 PM

    I thought it would be an easy victory

    I ... ended up only winning one out of our five games
It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over. And a few years later, no human can compete anymore.

I think we are in a similar situation in multiple professions today. For example with self-driving.

Musk recently said, that other car manufacturers are not much interested in talks about licensing FSD because they don't think it can work.

In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers anymore.