No Country for Old Men

GO players have been sent reeling in the last year. First came the AlphaGo program publicly beating one of the best GO players in the world early in the year. At the end of the year, that same program, temporarily disguised, tore through the rest of the GO community, winning 60 of 61 games online against all comers, including the best in the world. (The other game was drawn because of an internet connection failure.) Quote:

“Master” also claimed victories against a number of top Go pros including South Korea’s Park Jung-hwan and Japan’s Iyama Yuta, as well as beating China’s Ke Jie, who is currently ranked world number one, twice.

“When facing it, all traditional tactics are wrong,” commented Ke Jie after his defeat. Ke Jie had stated in December that he is currently not good enough to defeat AlphaGo.

GO had resisted the efforts of programmers for a very long time, unlike Chess, in which the programmers saw incremental improvement until they had surpassed human players. So we've had a long time to get used to this. But GO players are in shock, as AlphaGo seemed to come from nowhere to not only equal them, but surpass them by such a margin as to play at what appears to be a God-like level.

However, [GO master] Gu [Li] struck a different tone on Weibo (a Chinese microblogging site like Twitter), saying, “AlphaGo has completely subverted the control and judgment of us GO players. I can’t help but ask, one day many years later, when you find your previous awareness, cognition and choices are all wrong, will you keep going along the wrong path or reject yourself?” This uncertainty was echoed by GO master Ke Jie [ranked #1 in GO], who said, “After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong. I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of GO.” [emphasis added = ed.]

Chess players haven't quite had the same reaction to being surpassed, but then Steinitz only started pulling back the curtain from the deeper truths of the game less than 150 years ago. That and our ever constant search for novelties and cooks probably saved us from such a deep crisis of faith.

Certainty is a shaky foundation upon which to build the edifice of one's self.

HT: Alice Maz, whose tweet alerted me to this.