This really suggests that going the path of being the strongest is no longer sensical. Why would a human try to be the best calculator in the world, knowing it will never beat any calculator ever? Just to prove itself to other human caculator wannabes? Senseless.
This is a real paradigm shift and we still need to understand what to do. But obliviously ignore AlphaGo is akin should be unfathomable for a professional aspiring player.
As a professional, the first question to ask is what will AlphaGo bring to Go Theory. We still dont know how much stronger it is than Lee Sedol (or how far it is from "God"). Pushing it to its limits will show us insights we havent found yet and we will update ourselves as players to the most current theory.
The second step is answering the following question: Can human + AlphaGo beat Alpha Go? A human potentiated with AlphaGo's reading power can intuitively pick variations that would give it an edge? If so, we have found that Go still harbors a human secret that is jsut overly compensated by reading.
The last step would be, even if human participation gives negligible results, can human + Alpha Go create better games than Alpha Go?
The super GMs of the world - and basically all of the chess loving public with them - seem to have acknowledged it and moved on; why would such a transition be impossible in Go?
Is there a particular reason why a chess computer would be any more undefeatable than a Go computer? Even though Kasparov lost, Nakamura destroyed Rybka 10 years later. Now that we have a competitive Go AI, isn't it likely the game of Go will shift and be even more competitive since now more players can get world-class practice and suggestions on their own?
I don't think they are the same things. Marathon is about the physical limit of human beings, while Go is about mental limit.
Before there are cars, or trains, we all know we are not the fastest in the world. A rabbit can easily overrun an adult human.
However, we never thought that a dog or a bird will beat us in a game like GO. Thinking a machine beating the human champion in the game of GO, is like admitting that we are intelligently inferior to machines.
Likewise, if machines can do quality accounting, does that mean that accounts will be relegated to special accounting events, just like there are marathon events, where people come for aesthetic enjoyment or audience spectacle?
There's real cases of similar technology putting people out of jobs, for example I recently read that more and more finance firms more or less completely automate a lot of processes, even those where you'd traditionally would have counted on people's "gut feelings". Deep learning is eerily good at simulating "gut feelings".
However, cheating with computer assistance is likely to become a problem, as it is in chess.[1] (The state of the art in computer chess is now roughly at "laptop with off the shelf program can curb-stomp human world champion.")
[1] http://en.chessbase.com/post/yet-another-case-of-cheating-in...
[1] https://twitter.com/demishassabis/status/708489093676568576
[1] http://noenthuda.com/blog/2016/03/11/how-computers-have-chan...
The relevant paragraph is the one with the heading "Machine changes human", at the end.
http://www.wired.com/2016/03/sadness-beauty-watching-googles...
Actually I would expect game-players and game-instructors to do better than the median profession under such a scenario, because playing games against other humans for entertainment & pure enjoyment of competition is a very human pursuit.
Hell, Google should organize a "AlphaGo against the world" on internet.
Edit: fortunately the fine article brings this up and goes further to point out that go is fundamental to self improvement in some cultures and will likely have a long life after AlphaGo.
It's also mentioned that you can have your mind transferred into a drone busy, and vice versa, but it's seen as terribly gauche.
Its kind of like climbing mount Everest 'because it was there'. Its just not 'there' anymore.
We still enjoy trivia games even though it is easy to google the answers. I dunno, I think it is a bit of a stretch to think AlphaGo has ended serious competitive human Go.
The analogy to chess is an interesting one, though, not quite as straightforward as it may seem. Chess, when it was first conquered by computers a couple of decades ago, was a triumph of computer vs human, sure, but in such a different way from the way humans play it. Chess is amenable to brute force search in a way that go isn't (though I understand the chess programs really aren't pure brute force), but human chess players don't (as far as I know) really don't play chess in a brute force way, they rely in intuition, experience, and even a bit of gambling and hedging whether their opponent will "see" or "realize" the strategy in time.
As a result, the chess programs were winning through a "reasoning" process that was very different from what you experience watching people play the game. Something very different is going on when humans play, which makes it interesting - in that sense you can sort of dismiss the machine as playing a different game, albeit one with the same board, pieces, and rules. Instead, it's a giant calculation that happens to beat the more intuitive approach once you can search and score X positions per second through an entirely alternate approach to the game.
This current breakthrough with go sounds different, in that it may mean that computers now play go in a way that is much more similar to the way humans play it (it would be interesting to see if a chess program designed more like the go program would have a huge edge over the brute force search approach). Or, if not the same, perhaps a way that is equally if not more interesting.
I'm kind of bummed that I'm out of my depth on this one (I don't know go or chess well enough to really say), but it's an interesting question.
I also expect that more people will start playing Go, or like me, get a renewed interest in the game.
I read that Lee Sidol is planning on retiring from active play in a few years and move to the USA to evangelize the game in the West.
I played the South Korean national champion and the women's world champion in handicapped exhibition games in the 1970s. It would be awesome to get to do the same with Lee Sidol!
“A dolphin swims faster than Michael Phelps, but we still want to see how fast he can go,” Lockhart said. “We’re humans and we care about other humans and what they can do.”
Too many words, too little information for one article.
And if the answer is yes, why isn't anyone trying to use robots for that purpose?
I gather this may be a Big Deal, but except insofar as it kills the sport by a thousand cuts, 'Young Go Prodigies' have nothing to worry about.
Since the computer can tell for every single move whether you played perfectly or if not, by how much you decreased your chances of winning against perfect competition, you'll be able to get a hundred signals out of a game into your elo calculation, instead of just one win/loss condition.
They already do that for catching cheaters in chess. In essence, you treat the positions that occur in a game not as a logical sequence, but as a series of multiple-choice questions.
You're thinking in terms of 'The AI has solved Go mathematically', but that's not the case; Just because you can run a Monte Carlo best-choice-picker/guesser algorithm doesn't mean you can meaningfully rank how deliberate choices compare with each other more than a few plays away.
But there's so much more to this than human obsolescence. This is the cusp of a new stage in evolution.
Why are there so many young programmers adopting the Go
programming language, throughout Asia, exclusively?