[HN Gopher] After AI beat them, professional Go players got bett...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       After AI beat them, professional Go players got better and more
       creative
        
       Author : iNic
       Score  : 191 points
       Date   : 2024-04-08 19:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
        
       | lordnacho wrote:
       | This is the tip of the iceberg, right? It's foreshadowing AI
       | helping experts become better. I can see it happening in a lot of
       | creative fields, including software. Perhaps this is where it
       | really pulls the experts from the juniors, because only experts
       | will be able to judge whether the AI has helped him create
       | something actually good.
        
         | asolove wrote:
         | Go is a constructed game with a precise definition of the rules
         | and victory.
         | 
         | The real challenge with AI helping experts is whether it can
         | correctly help them balance their own value function for what
         | "better" means. And whether we can still train human experts
         | who can think about that independently with good judgement, if
         | we've automated away the things that beginners would normally
         | do to train their judgement with black boxes that they can't
         | interrogate.
         | 
         | Will be interesting for sure.
        
         | gcanko wrote:
         | It's exactly like the invention of agriculture. Not having to
         | hunt for food gave more opportunities for intellectual pursuits
         | because of having more free time.
        
           | rwbt wrote:
           | I'm skeptical of this argument. It gave free time to some
           | people i.e. the landed gentry but also created the toiling
           | peasants and a hierarchical civilization.
        
             | choilive wrote:
             | Many other types of governance was enabled by the
             | agricultural revolution, not just feudalism.
        
             | ohyes wrote:
             | Toiling peasants had more free time than we do today.
        
               | rwbt wrote:
               | Hunter gatherers had more leisure than farming peasants.
               | Surely, one can spot the trend.
        
               | TulliusCicero wrote:
               | [citation needed]
        
               | ummonk wrote:
               | The amount of toiling they could do without dying was
               | calorically limited. Having lethargy induced by a
               | shortage of food doesn't necessarily mean a preferable
               | lifestyle.
        
               | brailsafe wrote:
               | Pfft, disagree. Got laid off a year ago and have had
               | nearly 100% free time since
        
       | akira2501 wrote:
       | The other possibility is that it destroyed the incidental dogma
       | that tends to build up in these types of games and human
       | activities. This is why I like the "hacker ethos" as much as I
       | do, it tends to eschew things like "accepted" dogma in order to
       | find additional performance that other people were just leaving
       | on the table out of polite comfort.
        
         | JustLurking2022 wrote:
         | The dogma generally becomes accepted because it outperforms
         | other known strategies. In a game like Go, that could
         | previously take a while because there are so many possible
         | follow-ups that it takes time to accumulate enough data on
         | whether a new strategy is actually decisively better, or just
         | worse but over-performing because it's less known.
         | 
         | There's a big difference between those two and "the hacker
         | ethos" will lead to a lot of the latter. However, now computers
         | can simulate enough games to give a relatively high degree of
         | confidence that a variation in strategy is truly better.
        
           | Izkata wrote:
           | I don't know how it's developed since, but from what I
           | remember that was how it started - the AIs weren't following
           | the standard moves (joseki) that we'd built up over centuries
           | and human players were thrown off by the nonstandard
           | responses that were working better than expected.
        
         | coef2 wrote:
         | So the progress of human proficiency in Go and our collective
         | advancement over time is hindered by dogmatic rules introduced
         | over time. These rules predispose players toward specific
         | strategies and consequently limit the scope of our creative
         | potential within the game. In contrast, AI algorithms operate
         | without such biases offer a unique advantage in overcoming
         | these limitations. They essentially inspire us to get out of
         | established patterns (or local minima) of play and broaden the
         | range of our strategic moves.
        
       | dtnewman wrote:
       | Just look to Chess. The top players today are _way_ better than
       | any of the greats before, because they can train against
       | computers and know exactly where they failed. That said, because
       | they 've gotten so good, chess at the top levels is pretty
       | boring... it's hard to come up with a unique strategy so players
       | tend to be defensive. Lots of ties.
       | 
       | On the other hand, chess is more popular than ever. It's huge in
       | high schools. I see people playing it everywhere. I know that for
       | me, I love being able to play a game and then view the computer
       | analysis afterwards and see exactly what I did wrong (granted,
       | sometimes a move can be good for a computer who will know how to
       | follow through on the next 10 moves, but not necessarily good for
       | _me_... but most of the time I can see where I made a mistake
       | when the computer points it out).
       | 
       | Side note: I play on LIChess and it's great. Is there an
       | equivalent app for Go?
        
         | tptacek wrote:
         | online-go.com
        
           | anononaut wrote:
           | OGS is definitely the best server in the West. Deserves all
           | patronage it gets and more. I wish the AGA was more
           | supportive of it rather than KGS.
        
             | naet wrote:
             | KGS is still pretty great.
             | 
             | OGS might be more accessible to new players with one click
             | sign in and a better web app, but I think KGS has a higher
             | population of true dan+ strength players, and has a
             | stronger "culture" around community reviews and studying.
             | 
             | It used to be even better, but there are less total people
             | playing on KGS than the previous peak.
        
               | tptacek wrote:
               | I found the culture on OGS, particularly wrt moderation,
               | to be pretty great (as a newcomer, and I exclusively play
               | 9x9).
               | 
               | I've read about KGS but I've never figured out how to
               | engage with it. (I know it to be the OG, srs bzns venue,
               | though).
        
             | Alex3917 wrote:
             | > I wish the AGA was more supportive of it rather than KGS.
             | 
             | Out of curiosity, why do you like OGS more? I find the UX
             | of KGS to be way more intuitive.
        
         | fryz wrote:
         | FWIW, I find the classical chess tournaments with the super GMs
         | to be fairly interesting, if only because the focus of the
         | games is more about the metagame than about the game itself.
         | 
         | The article linked at the bottom of the source is a WSJ piece
         | about how Magnus beats the best players because of the "human
         | element".
         | 
         | A lot about the games today are about opening preparation,
         | where the goal is to out-prepare and surprise your opponent by
         | studying opening lines and esoteric responses (somewhere
         | computer play has drastically opened up new fields). Similarly,
         | during the middle/end-games, the best players will try to force
         | uncomfortable decisions on their opponents, knowing what
         | positions their opponents tend to not prefer. For example, in
         | the candidates game round 1, Fabiano took Hikari into a
         | position that had very little in the way of aggressive counter-
         | play, effectively taking away a big advantage that Hikaru would
         | otherwise have had.
         | 
         | Watching these games feels somewhat akin to watching generals
         | develop strategies trying to out maneuver their counterparts on
         | the other side, taking into consideration their strengths and
         | weaknesses as much as the tactics/deployment of troops/etc.
        
           | akkartik wrote:
           | On the other hand, a game like Praggnanandhaa vs Vidit 2 days
           | ago feels like Russian roulette.
           | 
           | https://www.chess.com/news/view/2024-fide-candidates-
           | tournam...
           | 
           | Mistakes on both sides, including the side that presumably
           | prepared this line with help from computers.
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | > Just look to Chess. The top players today are way better than
         | any of the greats before, because they can train against
         | computers and know exactly where they failed.
         | 
         | AlphaGo isn't available for anyone to train against like
         | Stockfish is though, what are Go players using? Has another
         | powerful Go engine been developed since then?
        
           | espadrine wrote:
           | KataGo is an open-source algorithm derived from AlphaGo, but
           | with a number of tricks so that it trained faster:
           | https://katagotraining.org/
           | 
           | It likely surpasses AlphaGo, and just like Stockfish, it
           | delivers a protocol that can hook into many user interface
           | apps: https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo?tab=readme-ov-
           | file#gui...
           | 
           | From those technologies, also came an interesting
           | visualisation of how human players changed their habits
           | following AlphaGo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-ntvk3D1
           | _pgjJ7u64t4jMYMh0z...
        
           | SonOfLilit wrote:
           | We use KataGo and sometimes LeelaZero (which is a replication
           | of the AlphZero paper). KataGo was trained with more
           | knowledge of the game (feature engineering and loss
           | engineering), so it trained faster. It was also trained on
           | different board sizes and to play to get a good result when
           | it's already behind or ahead.
           | 
           | KaTrain is a good frontend.
        
             | kadoban wrote:
             | > KataGo was trained with more knowledge of the game
             | (feature engineering and loss engineering), so it trained
             | faster.
             | 
             | Not really important to your point, but it's not really
             | just that it uses more game knowledge. Mostly it's that a
             | small but dedicated community (especially lightvector)
             | worked hard to build on what AlphaGo and LeelaZero did.
             | 
             | Lightvector is a genius and put a lot of effort into
             | KataGo. It wasn't just add some game knowledge and that's
             | it. https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo?tab=readme-ov-
             | file#tra... has a bunch of info if you're interested.
        
               | SonOfLilit wrote:
               | I wasn't at all trying to say his work was simple. I was
               | trying to say "deepmind were trying to build an AI that
               | gets good at games without anything in their structures
               | being specialized for the game, lightvector asked what if
               | we did specialize the model on Go". And he did some
               | wonderfully clever things.
        
         | timetraveller26 wrote:
         | Don't know about go, but Lishogi is Lichess for shogi (Japanese
         | chess)
        
         | Bootvis wrote:
         | Second round of the Candidates tournament played Friday had 4/4
         | decisive games[1]. In general, a tie might be the most common
         | result but even at the highest level there tend to be chances
         | for both sides.
         | 
         | [1]: https://lichess.org/broadcast/fide-candidates-2024--
         | open/rou...
        
           | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
           | It's really up to the players. SuperGMs these days are
           | somewhat addicted to draws because it's a very safe result in
           | a tournament setting and in terms of rating. Therefore these
           | players tend to favour less risky and more calculable
           | openings. They care more about avoiding a loss than they do
           | about winning.
           | 
           | The idea that the large amount of draws is because players
           | are so strong now, is mostly a myth. It's really just
           | psychology and game theory at work.
           | 
           | For a perfect illustration of all my points, look at Aronian
           | vs Grischuk from the 2018 candidates tournament. Here both
           | players chose to play into complications, and the resulting
           | game was wildly complex, with both players making several
           | suboptimal moves simply because the position was just too
           | complex even for two of the strongest calculators in the game
           | at the time.
           | 
           | And in the end, they still ended up constructing a draw by
           | repetition when all 3 results were still possible. Both
           | players had good winning chances, yet the fear of losing
           | finally overtook them and they collectively bailed out of the
           | game.
           | 
           | It's not that players are now so strong it's almost
           | impossible to win, the players just aren't as willing to seek
           | out the necessary positions.
        
         | thatswrong0 wrote:
         | I wish Chess960 was more popular for this exact reason. It's
         | super fun to watch and play compared to normal Chess...
         | basically all I do with my friends
        
         | Taek wrote:
         | I think you would see fewer ties if players got 0.2 points each
         | for draws instead of 0.5 points each for draws.
         | 
         | It makes the risk of going for a risky strategy lower (you only
         | drop 0.2 pts instead of 0.5 vs getting an easy draw) and it
         | makes the rewards much greater... a single win and 4 losses
         | scores the same as 5 draws.
         | 
         | you wont see players doing intentional draws anymore either
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | think it is somewhat intrinsic to chess that it makes sense
           | to go for ties as black in top tier play
        
           | BurningFrog wrote:
           | Football (Soccer) did something similar.
           | 
           | Before that is was 2 points for a win, 1 point each for a
           | draw.
           | 
           | In 1981 they made it 3 points for a win, and the sport has
           | had substantially more offensive play since.
        
           | dfan wrote:
           | One issue with this is that it encourages collusion. If
           | you're a top GM playing someone of equal skill, it's +EV to
           | agree to flip a coin beforehand to determine who will win
           | (and then play a fake game) rather than playing it for real.
           | 
           | Some chess tournaments have experimented with giving 1/3
           | point for draws instead of 1/2 and it didn't really change
           | much. Mostly it acted as a tiebreaker, which you could have
           | done by just using "most wins" as a tiebreaker anyway.
           | 
           | My favorite idea (not mine) for creating decisive results in
           | chess is that when a draw is agreed, you switch sides and
           | start a new game, but don't reset the clocks.
        
           | neysofu wrote:
           | Another possible solution would be to simply... remove draws
           | from the game. Instead of checkmating the goal becomes to
           | capture the opponent's king.
           | 
           | Needless to say, no one likes this idea because it throws out
           | of the window centuries of game theory. Endgames would be
           | completely different. I'm not convinced it would be a less
           | interesting game, though.
        
             | BurningFrog wrote:
             | There are many situations when this is for all practical
             | purposes impossible.
             | 
             | For example a King vs King endgame. Even really weak
             | players will never accidentally put their king next to the
             | opponent.
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | at least as described, would not be sufficient to remove
             | draws from the game - but would remove stalemates
        
             | btilly wrote:
             | And what happens if you wind up with king and rook vs king
             | and rook?
             | 
             | Some positions simply do not allow for a win. Yes, you
             | could say do it on time. But then it becomes about
             | mechanical dexterity as people try to be faster than their
             | opponent in a pointless piece shuffle.
        
               | neysofu wrote:
               | Yeah, I didn't think it through. I'd imagine such a rule
               | change would still make draws significantly less likely
               | though, right?
        
             | wh0knows wrote:
             | If you have insufficient material how can you capture the
             | king? Checkmate is by definition one move before forced
             | capture of the king, the game doesn't change by making it
             | end one move later.
        
             | acchow wrote:
             | > Instead of checkmating the goal becomes to capture the
             | opponent's king.
             | 
             | These are the same.
        
               | neysofu wrote:
               | They are not - if the goal becomes to capture the king,
               | and check-related rules are removed from the game,
               | stalemates become impossible.
        
         | Angostura wrote:
         | > The Queens Gambit turned quite a few of my daughter's friends
         | on to chess
        
         | hibikir wrote:
         | The defensiveness has absolutely nothing to do with better
         | computers and the improvements in play that came with it, but
         | with tournaments where risk taking is an economic disaster. As
         | others have said, there aren't massive numbers of ties in the
         | candidates tournament, because the difference in value between
         | being first and second is so massive that if you aren't first,
         | you are last.
         | 
         | Compare this to regular high level chess in the Grand Chess
         | Tour: It's where most of your money is going to come from if
         | you are a top player. Invitation to the tour as a regular is by
         | rating, and there's enough money at the bottom of the tour than
         | the difference between qualifying or not is massive. Therefore,
         | the most important thing is to stay in the tour train. Lose 20
         | points of rating, and barring Rex Sinquefield deciding to
         | sponsor your life out of the goodness of his heart, you might
         | as well spend time coaching, because there are so few
         | tournaments where there's a lot of money.
         | 
         | This also shows in the big difficulties for youngsters that
         | reach 2650 or so: They are only going to find good enough
         | opponents to move up quickly in a handful of events a year
         | where people with higher rating end up risking their rating
         | against them. See how something like the US championship is a
         | big risk for the top US professionals, because all the young
         | players that show are at least 50 points underrated, if not
         | more.
         | 
         | This is what causes draws, not computer prep. Anand was better
         | at just drawing every game in every tournament back when he was
         | still on the tour, and yet computers were far worse than today,
         | especially with opening theory.
        
           | ummonk wrote:
           | And it simply doesn't have to be this way. The top
           | tournaments could just use a prior qualification tournament
           | with an open Swiss. Then invite the top finishers from the
           | open Swiss to participate in the round robin. Can reserve an
           | invitational wildcard or two but the rest should have to earn
           | their place.
        
           | santoshalper wrote:
           | Very insightful!
        
         | yeellow wrote:
         | I recommend goQuest (mobile app), and playing 9x9 go. I used to
         | play on KGS, but it is less crowded now (the problem is that
         | there are too many servers: OGS, IGS, Tygem, Wbadul, etc and no
         | one dominates, therefore you wait for the game, you need a
         | rating, etc. Most are not very modern, mobile unfriendly,
         | etc.). Also 19x19 takes too much time for me when comparing to
         | chess, 9x9 is perfect, and goQuest has many active players,
         | after a few seconds you get a match (they offer 13x13 and
         | 19x19, but those are less active I suppose).
        
         | Pet_Ant wrote:
         | > That said, because they've gotten so good, chess at the top
         | levels is pretty boring
         | 
         | Yeah, I feel the same thing about Magic formats when the pros
         | play. When a format is new and people are discovering, and they
         | have to rely on their gut, and make educated guesses. That's
         | when it's fun to play and watch.
        
         | zer0-c00l wrote:
         | https://online-go.com/ is the easiest place to get started as a
         | western beginner. The far more active go servers are Asian and
         | have a higher barrier to entry in terms of registration,
         | downloading the client, and dealing with poor localization.
         | (Fox Weiqi, Tygem, etc.)
        
         | pushedx wrote:
         | KGS is where I used to play, this is the homepage:
         | 
         | https://www.gokgs.com/
         | 
         | and this is the web client:
         | 
         | https://shin.gokgs.com/
         | 
         | The homepage hasn't had a redesign since at the latest 2007,
         | but the community is great an there are top players on there.
        
       | yinser wrote:
       | Computers were always going to be better at searching large
       | trees, now they can help steer new heuristics for human players.
        
         | SonOfLilit wrote:
         | I'm not sure a computer without search defeats the best human
         | playing without any search, but I know it defeats 1dan players
         | (very smart people who put in 5-10 years of deliberate
         | practice) when they are allowed to use as much search as they
         | are able.
        
       | lvl102 wrote:
       | Pro players train with AI and you can often see "blue dot" moves
       | in tournament settings.
        
         | anononaut wrote:
         | It's become go broadcasting standard to show some AI bot's
         | win/loss confidence percentage for a given board state. It was
         | fascinating for a few years, but now I feel like it takes away
         | from some of the magic of watching pro level play.
        
       | tptacek wrote:
       | When you read Go strategy resources, you see a lot of things
       | divided into what best practices were before AlphaGo and what
       | they are now. It's a whole big thing.
       | 
       | It is still the case, though, that AI dominates humans at Go;
       | humans didn't get so creative about the game that they put AI
       | back on its toes (though some did discover exploitable AI
       | "strategy bugs").
        
         | pa7ch wrote:
         | Agreed, but I still think humans should get a little more
         | credit for winning against AI no matter how. Its a competitive
         | game with very simple and clear rules. A hole in AI strategy is
         | a hole, even if quickly patched!
         | 
         | I am still so impressed that Lee Sedol beat Alpha Go 1 game out
         | of 5 way back when AI made its breakout. I was sad he felt so
         | sheepish afterward for losing. In hindsight, I think it was an
         | amazing accomplishment even if today an AI could beat Shin Jin-
         | Seo (#1 player) 100 out of 100 times!
        
         | paulcole wrote:
         | This is true in Scrabble as well.
         | 
         | When I was playing seriously there were strong players who
         | played a ton over a board and had deep intuition about what
         | made plays good and what made plays bad. In the late 1990s/
         | early 2000s there started to be a lot more in the way of
         | computer simulation and analysis and some very strong computer
         | players.
         | 
         | One (general) example was that older players liked the idea of
         | making longer plays using more tiles to "win" a race to the S
         | and blank tiles (the best tiles in the bag). Computer
         | simulations generally show that turnover (as this is called)
         | isn't optimal and you're better off holding strong combinations
         | of letters rather than playing them off hoping to draw
         | something better.
         | 
         | Now younger players are better than ever because all of their
         | training came with the help of computer analysis and
         | simulation.
         | 
         | Of course in Scrabble a huge part of it comes down to just
         | memorizing the words in the dictionary.
        
           | cdelsolar wrote:
           | AI doesn't dominate people in Scrabble though. The best
           | humans are better than the best AI.
        
             | samatman wrote:
             | I wouldn't have expected that. Is it just a relative lack
             | of interest in building an AI which can dominate Scrabble?
             | 
             | It's a partial-information game, but the search space can't
             | be as big as Go, and an AI has an advantage over human
             | players in that the entire valid string family can be
             | encoded into a trie or some other efficient data structure,
             | it's never going to forget a word or think it can play one
             | that isn't valid.
             | 
             | My intuition is that AI should be able to crush the best
             | human players at this point in time, but I'm open to being
             | corrected on that if there's some aspect of the game which
             | I'm not modeling correctly.
        
               | ultrasaurus wrote:
               | That strikes me as odd too -- but it might be because
               | searching a dictionary is such an obvious computer
               | advantage that it's not interesting to optimize. There
               | are only 10 articles on arxiv.org that mention Scrabble
               | vs 100s on Chess
               | 
               | https://arxiv.org/search/?query=scrabble&searchtype=all&s
               | our...
        
               | paulcole wrote:
               | Just finding the highest scoring word won't make you all
               | that good. If you played the highest scoring play
               | available to you each turn you wouldn't be that strong of
               | a player. Maybe around top 200-500 or so in the US I
               | would guess? And it'd be a super exploitable strategy by
               | a decent player.
               | 
               | The reason is that you need to apply some rules, like
               | when to trade vs. making a play, balancing consonants and
               | vowels for future plays, what parts of the board are too
               | dangerous to make certain plays in, etc. It's because of
               | the distribution of unplayed tiles, the high-scoring
               | spots on the board, and the 50-point bonus for using all
               | of your tiles.
               | 
               | Because of that, generally, you'll do better by building
               | towards a 50-point bonus play every 3 or 4 turns than by
               | maxing your score on each turn.
               | 
               | I'd be curious about letting a human player play with the
               | assistance of the best bot available and seeing how much
               | better that would make them. I guess part of the issue
               | though is that in a 13 play game maybe 3 plays are
               | meaningfully difficult. So it'd take awhile to see if the
               | human is improving on the bot or not.
        
             | paulcole wrote:
             | I'll admit I'm out of the loop but how many people in the
             | world today do you think can beat BestBot over a
             | significantly long series? Do you think there's going to be
             | a bot that dominates people in series like that?
             | 
             | I've been following Mack Meller's YT channel and he's
             | getting beaten pretty handily in his series.
             | 
             | I'd put the over/under on people playing today who would
             | beat BestBot in a 100-game series at say 3.5. What side
             | would you take?
        
         | SonOfLilit wrote:
         | You also see a similar division to 19th century and 20th
         | century when a player called Go Seigen changed the way the game
         | is player even more, I feel, than AI did (but don't take my
         | word, at 7kyu I'm far from qualified to understand how
         | professionals play)
        
         | Alex3917 wrote:
         | > When you read Go strategy resources, you see a lot of things
         | divided into what best practices were before AlphaGo and what
         | they are now. It's a whole big thing.
         | 
         | Yes and no. The biggest takeaway from AI is that learning all
         | the joseki doesn't actually matter that much, which has freed
         | up players (except for the pros) to spend more of their time
         | focusing on the more fun and interesting parts of the game.
         | 
         | There are a lot of videos showing what josekis and strategies
         | the AI recommends, but as a human you're likely not going to be
         | any better off following them.
        
       | Mtinie wrote:
       | This supports with my hypothesis about human-created art, post-
       | AI.
       | 
       | People are deeply concerned about how their livelihoods and
       | identities will survive the next few years. I get it, and while
       | there's certainly a level of existential dread that feels
       | reasonable, I don't see many people yet discussing what the
       | visual arts industries will look like on the other side.
       | 
       | If Go play is in any way a creative exercise--which I've heard it
       | is-- then I'm super interested to see the state of humans in the
       | arts 24 months out from now.
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | There is a key difference in the way these models are trained -
         | Chess and Go have clearly defined win conditions, so a model
         | can be taught to explore the possibility space and try to reach
         | victory by any means necessary, potentially with strategies
         | which have never been seen before. With art on the other hand
         | there is no objective measure of quality, so the models are
         | instead taught to treat already existing art as the benchmark
         | to strive towards, making them trite by nature.
         | 
         | As I see it AI can absolutely find innovative solutions, but
         | only if you can clearly and explicitly define the problem it
         | needs to solve.
        
           | Mtinie wrote:
           | I use diffusion models and other generative tools to give me
           | inspiration for works. While these aren't solutions, per say,
           | the tools do help me define (and refine) my approaches and
           | offer visual options to consider.
        
           | CamperBob2 wrote:
           | _With art on the other hand there is no objective measure of
           | quality, so the models are instead taught to treat already
           | existing art as the benchmark to strive towards, making them
           | trite by nature._
           | 
           | Isn't this reminiscent of the arguments that were made at the
           | dawn of photography as an art form? Some were afraid that
           | portraiture was finished as an art form, but we got
           | Impressionism, Cubism, and a host of other innovative forms
           | to take its place. Never mind that portraiture was not in
           | fact killed by photography, nor was any other visual form.
           | 
           | Others swore that cameras and film would never be valid
           | implements of art, but they got awfully quiet when Adams and
           | Weston and others showed up on the scene, and you don't hear
           | much from them at all these days.
           | 
           | If nobody was afraid of AI -- if nobody was screaming bloody
           | murder about how urgent it was to stop it -- only _then_
           | could we safely say that it will have no role or relevance in
           | art.
        
         | smokel wrote:
         | Most of contemporary art is unaffected by the current AI craze.
         | 
         | On one hand, the art world has been steadily pushing boundaries
         | since the 19th century, and computer technology is just one
         | blip on the vast radar of interesting subjects (other
         | fashionable ones being gender, colonialist history, social
         | practices, and physical properties of paint).
         | 
         | On the other hand, art is mostly created by artists who were
         | professionally trained as artists, i.e. not as scientists.
         | Knowledge about computer technology is typically rather limited
         | with both artists and collectors, leading to fairly bland
         | stuff, or properly misguided hypes such as NFTs.
        
           | Mtinie wrote:
           | > Most of contemporary art is unaffected by the current AI
           | craze.
           | 
           | The illustrators and digital artists I know would generally
           | disagree.
           | 
           | As an abstract painter, I agree with you.
           | 
           | Significant genre specificity.
        
       | zerocrates wrote:
       | Just finally getting around to reading/finishing my copy of Seven
       | Games by Oliver Roeder, which covers checkers, chess, go,
       | backgammon, poker, Scrabble and bridge, and the efforts for
       | computers winning/solving each.
       | 
       | A common theme is the effects of the computers on the human
       | players in elevating (but maybe also homogenizing) play.
        
       | Art9681 wrote:
       | When AI beats Go players, they roll up their sleeves and practice
       | their passion and try to get better.
       | 
       | When AI beats Hollywood...
        
         | Tenoke wrote:
         | The reward in Hollywood and most professional fields is about
         | who makes the best/most cost efficient product no matter what.
         | 
         | If the same was true for chess or go then players would be
         | using computer assistance in every top level game.
        
         | anononaut wrote:
         | I see the point you're making, and well made, but I think it
         | also highlights a distinction in problems between the two. In
         | the case of go, people who want to play go are the main
         | motivating force. In the case of movies, I don't give a damn
         | about Hollywood, the money, the studios, the IP, the actors. I
         | only care about the quality of the film. Maybe the autuer, if
         | there is one.
         | 
         | AI changing conceptions about chess or go is very different
         | than generative Ai which can radically change the means of how
         | something is produced. I'm still going to play go because I
         | love it. Meanwhile, I would happily cut out film studios (as we
         | know them) if it meant I got to watch quality cinema.
        
       | intuitionist wrote:
       | The blog doesn't say anything about how this "decision quality"
       | metric is calculated... but presumably it's using very similar Go
       | evaluation functions to the ones used in the superhuman AI
       | players, right? I think it's highly unsurprising that humans
       | would improve by that metric -- they're learning from the
       | machine, so of course the machine likes it.
       | 
       | Also, most things in life are not two-player zero-sum games where
       | you can construct an evaluation function and build a "decision
       | quality" metric out of it. So I'm not sure what the takeaway
       | should be in those cases.
        
         | SonOfLilit wrote:
         | Computers are so much better than humans at Go that the metric
         | for board evaluation applies better to human games than it does
         | to computer games. Just as I'm better at evaluating code
         | written by GPT than code written by senior developers.
         | 
         | Otherwise you'd see players who don't train with computers
         | winning in tournaments against those who do.
        
           | intuitionist wrote:
           | Yeah, I don't think the metric is wrong or bad, just that
           | it's not telling us anything special. Or maybe it's telling
           | us something about Go AIs (that the "insights" they have are
           | human-comprehensible) but it's not at all clear that this
           | fully generalizes.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | Of course it doesn't work that easy in other fields.
             | Basically the go board is an environment, the the AI model
             | learns by creating its experiences in the environment.
             | 
             | This can be applied to other kinds of environment, such as
             | code execution, simulation, video games, human-AI chat
             | rooms or robots. But each environment has its own
             | complexity and searching for good strategies can take a
             | long time. It's the same with scientific research, got to
             | validate the theory in the world.
        
             | SonOfLilit wrote:
             | It sounds from your analysis that "better as evaluated by
             | AI" would be true even if it wasn't really objectively
             | better. All I'm saying is that yes, it does mean
             | objectively better in this case.
        
       | matthest wrote:
       | Entertainment is one industry that will survive post-AI.
       | 
       | We're still going to want to watch _humans_ play sports, music
       | and video games. We 're going to want to watch _humans_ act, cook
       | food, and make vlogs.
       | 
       | The chess industry is growing rapidly, even though it has already
       | been conquered by AI:
       | https://www.einpresswire.com/article/649379223/chess-market-...
        
         | ultra_nick wrote:
         | There are content farms in Facebook churning out fake grandkids
         | for old folks to fawn over.
        
         | suyash wrote:
         | That's the next one on the chopping block, wait till Sora and
         | related services comes out, it's all going to be digitally
         | generated and will look just as real so yes it will be content
         | about humans but without human doing/creating much of it.
        
           | tylerchilds wrote:
           | as both an engineer and an entertainer, perception is
           | reality. on the one hand, a computer system could 1:1
           | recreate a stunt a human did and elevate it to a stunt a
           | human couldn't do.
           | 
           | people witness entertainment to trick their minds, and the
           | disbelief and astonishment in the human condition hinges on
           | "there's no way _i_ could do that" and once they know they
           | literally could not have done it, they're not impressed. they
           | may pay to be fooled once, but never twice.
           | 
           | there's a market for what you're talking about, but that
           | space is b2b and not c2c, which is where entertainment money
           | flows.
           | 
           | tl;dr dollar for dollar, ai vs taylor swift, taylor swift
           | wins every time, no contest.
        
         | chasd00 wrote:
         | humans will always have contests to see which human or group of
         | humans is the best at something and it will always be
         | entertaining to watch the contests. op is right.
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | As a lifelong musician, AI music has reached a level where it's
         | able to write absolute bangers AND soulful music with feeling.
         | Last weekend I listened to AI music all weekend long in
         | absolute shock.
         | 
         | People will still want to go to concerts, but a lot of that
         | music will either be written by, or inspired by AI.
         | 
         | This is one that I generated that has me convinced anyway. I
         | made about 100 versions in different styles, but this makes my
         | hair stand up.
         | 
         | https://app.suno.ai/song/77d97c83-8633-47d2-80b2-fe47952a6bc...
         | 
         | And a stoner rock banger:
         | 
         | https://app.suno.ai/song/2071317f-a5ba-4f1f-b77b-048d6ff03a9...
         | 
         | I mean, even if you don't think it's perfect, you re-record
         | those and no one's going to know it's AI.
        
       | Lacerda69 wrote:
       | AI will force artists to learn how to draw perfect hands as every
       | artwork with bad hands will be instantly flagged as generated.
        
       | timetraveller26 wrote:
       | I watched the alpha go doc and it was really shocking to me when
       | one of the top go players decided to retire because the game was
       | meaningless now that computers could beat anybody.
       | 
       | it's good seeing that that wasn't the case for all players.
        
         | Solvency wrote:
         | i don't get it, this applies to every single game. you can't
         | beat aimbots in fps, you can even rig any game bot to play
         | perfectly.
         | 
         | that's why you play against HUMANS.
        
           | gensym wrote:
           | I enjoy rock climbing even though I'll never be as good as a
           | monkey or a mountain goat.
        
             | krisoft wrote:
             | Yeah but the difference is that you were always worse than
             | a monkey or a mountain goat. And those are all worse than
             | someone riding a helicopter to the top. So you didn't had
             | to change your mindset in this regard ever.
             | 
             | Imagine if you grow up where there are no monkeys, mountain
             | goats or helicopter rides to the top. You never heard of
             | them, they are not a thing in your world. And you put in
             | hard work to become a very very good rock climber. You
             | kinda fancy yourself an apex climber. Maybe your mate
             | George is a bit faster than you sometimes, but sometimes
             | you are faster than him. Sometimes Sarah beaths the both of
             | you, but sometimes you beat her times. You are kinda up
             | there with the bests as far as you know. And then suddenly
             | someone brings a monkey to your rock climbing gym and the
             | monkey smokes all of you. It climbs walls much better than
             | you ever could. Now you have to adapt. Will you change your
             | viewpoint and start seeing yourself as "best among humans"
             | and keep competing like that? Or will you see yourself as
             | "clearly outcompeted so badly I might even give up"? Some
             | people will go one way, some the other way. And then the
             | new generation will grow up with the knowledge of monkeys,
             | and they all naturally will be only the first kind of
             | people, who understand that they can't be the best only
             | best among their class.
             | 
             | Go players had their "the first monkey shows up in the
             | climbing gym" moment during our lifetime. That is why you
             | see some of the players react like that. That is a very
             | different world from rock climbing where everyone already
             | knows about monkeys, and mountain goats and helicopter
             | rides since forever. Every person currently climbing rocks
             | started climbing with the existence of monkeys, mountain
             | goats and helicopters already incorporated into their
             | thinking way before they climbed their first wall.
        
           | anononaut wrote:
           | Pros saw the writing on the wall, but remember that no bot
           | was even particularly close to pro strength until 2016. Go
           | was dogmatically described as still being decades away from
           | bots being able to play competitively. For some professionals
           | like Lee Sedol, the burning desire was to play the best games
           | and best moves possible. To such an abstract game about
           | intuition, seeing it finally be dominated by machines could
           | understandably be crushing.
        
           | krisoft wrote:
           | > this applies to every single game
           | 
           | But it did not used to apply for every single game. In fact
           | in Go it was famously true just a few years ago that the best
           | humans were waay waay better than even the best computers.
           | 
           | At uni I hung out with Go players and they had all kind of
           | theories why Go is particularly hard for computers. Some of
           | them well quite well reasoned, and some were just a bunch of
           | magical thinking. What was not in doubt is that even at that
           | admitedly medium level the players were better than the
           | computers they had access to.
           | 
           | Just a few years ago it went from "we are competing to be the
           | best Go players period" to "we are competing to be the best
           | human Go players". That is a change in mindset, and it seems
           | at least for that one particular player they couldn't make
           | the change.
           | 
           | Imagine that you grew up in a world where aimbots are just
           | worse than mediocre players, always. And you build up your
           | personal motivations with this fact. And then suddenly the
           | aimbots get better than even the best players. Some systems
           | of motivation will crumble when this happens. Some will
           | manage to adapt. This is just how it is.
        
         | fjfaase wrote:
         | Lee Sedol continued games until the summer of 2019, more than
         | three years after the match. He quickly dropped in strength
         | while other players who already were stronger than him during
         | the challenge were further rising in strength, surpassing all
         | previous players according to the graph shown at the Go Ratings
         | website. https://www.goratings.org/en/history/
         | 
         | Just like in mathematics many professional Go player peak
         | before 40, after which the slowly become weaker and weaker.
        
       | usgroup wrote:
       | Can I rephrase this? "Professional Go players finally have a
       | software good enough to beat them, as a result of which they got
       | better by using the software".
        
         | ajkjk wrote:
         | No? The article makes the point explicitly that they did not
         | only get better by using the software; they're also better at
         | playing moves the computer does not play.
        
           | SonOfLilit wrote:
           | It makes the point that they learned not only by
           | memorization. They still learned it by using the software.
        
       | kccqzy wrote:
       | > Shin et al calculate about 40 percent of the improvement came
       | from moves that could have been memorized by studying the AI. But
       | moves that deviated from what the AI would do also improved, and
       | these "human moves" accounted for 60 percent of the improvement.
       | 
       | I don't often play Go myself but a number of my friends do. Among
       | non-professional players, it is really common to see game play
       | being not as exciting as before because there's now an easy way:
       | just memorize and copy what the AI does. I don't doubt that
       | professional players still have a ton of creativity, but a lot of
       | non-pros don't really have too much creativity and the whole game
       | becomes memorizing and replicating AI moves.
        
         | thomasahle wrote:
         | > a lot of non-pros don't really have too much creativity and
         | the whole game becomes memorizing and replicating AI moves.
         | 
         | That makes no sense. After 10-20 moves you are surely in a
         | position that has never been played before. How do you memorize
         | moves after that?
        
           | datameta wrote:
           | Perhaps sub-positions still repeat with some regularity?
           | Meaning subsets of the board. I have never played Go however,
           | I've only seen the board and read the rules.
        
           | hibikir wrote:
           | You'd be surprised. Joseki are corner shapes, which might
           | interact with other corners in the medium to long run, but
           | whose interactions are way too difficult for any human to
           | understand well. Therefore, you have 4 corners, and it's
           | quite likely that you'll see 4 joseki getting played in any
           | game. Joseki sequences have been studied for a long time, so
           | they can be relatively long: Say, 15+ moves of an avalanche
           | joseki, memorized by both players, and that's just one
           | corner. So even before computers were any good, you could
           | still see pretty iffy players using memorized patterns in
           | every corner for a total way past 20 moves.
        
           | tasuki wrote:
           | The accepted approach used to be that the direction of play
           | mattered. Now the AI has told us that no, just get locally-
           | even results in all corners and you're fine. I never would've
           | guessed!
        
         | anononaut wrote:
         | Before that, weak amateurs were just replicating human joseki.
         | That's nothing new. They definitely give a player a good start,
         | but knowing which to use and when, and of course how to follow
         | up until the game is over is no simple task. It also happens to
         | be the case that AlphaGo, KataGo etc. prefer simplifying the
         | board state. Remove complexity and win only by a thin margin,
         | because that's all that's needed. Memorizing AI preferences is
         | much easier than some of these highly complicated joseki.
        
         | csa wrote:
         | > Among non-professional players, it is really common to see
         | game play being not as exciting as before because there's now
         | an easy way: just memorize and copy what the AI does
         | 
         | This is just... not true.
         | 
         | Unless one is playing at high dan ranks, it's trivially easy to
         | induce a "memorized sequence" that your opponent either will
         | not have memorized or will leave them with a situation that
         | they don't understand well enough to capitalize on.
         | 
         | The "slack moves" in the openings that pros talk about are
         | often worth 1.5 points or less (often a fraction of a point),
         | and that assumes pro-level follow up.
         | 
         | This pro-level follow up is laughably rare outside of strong
         | amateur dan levels and pro levels (and even within those ranks
         | there are substantial differences).
        
       | idkdotcom wrote:
       | Go is a finite search game. So each chess.
       | 
       | Equating intelligence to being good as these games is as silly as
       | equating intelligence to being good at solving differential
       | equations. Computers have bested humans at solving differential
       | equations for many decades now. Nobody said "gee humans are now
       | stupid".
       | 
       | AI, as a knowledge field, is biased in this notion that all it
       | matters when it comes to intelligence is that computers beat
       | humans at Go or Chess.
        
       | suyash wrote:
       | It's just a little boost, AI will keep getting better and better
       | at faster pace, humans will have to figure out a different
       | strategy all together.
        
       | bravura wrote:
       | 1) I would really be interested in broad brush strokes to
       | understand how go theory has expanded.
       | 
       | 2) I really wish we could shake the ant-farm with chess and go
       | Fischer random chess. There's something nice about not having to
       | memorize openings.
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | At the same time, the familiarity of openings is nice.
         | 
         | Imagine completely random WoW battlegrounds. Part of the fun is
         | knowing the territory and strategies rather than having to make
         | them up from scratch each game.
        
       | f_allwein wrote:
       | ,,Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being
       | defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings"
       | 
       | Rilke, ,,The Beholder"
       | 
       | https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2009/11/man-watching-der-scha...
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | If I was a professional player of any sort of game that AI can
       | play then I would never play against AI.
       | 
       | Just be a human, play against other humans. Who cares what AI can
       | do?
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | People who want to get better care. Everyone who plays chess
         | uses AI to improve.
        
       | ummonk wrote:
       | The article is misleading regarding the history of chess. Magnus
       | excepted, most top players did adopt a more cold and calculating
       | material-focused chess style that mimicked Deep Blue and
       | subsequent chess computers. It was only with the success of
       | AlphaGo and LC0 that top chess players have started playing a
       | more creative playstyle again, playing various wing pawn
       | advances, as well as being more willing to give up material for
       | nebulous initiative or positional advantages.
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | Seven years ago I took remote Go playing lessons from a South
       | Korean professional player. I stopped after about 5 months and
       | started using CS Pro Go on my iPad Pro and it has a nice teaching
       | feature of rating every one of my moves so after a game I can see
       | where my biggest mistakes were. This is different than pro
       | players learning new surprising strategies, for me it is nice to
       | use.
        
       | seoulmetro wrote:
       | Is this a surprise? The best people at any craft learn from the
       | people that beat them.
        
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