Go Players Disempower Themselves to AI

bmacho

Probably a large amount of Go players really don't enjoy the hard parts of playing Go: thinking hard, rote learning, trying to make no mistakes for hours, and the disappointment when one loses (~50% of the games). Maybe it is even the minority who are okay with that. > Our students would often set out to play a normal game of Go, but would get stuck on a particularly difficult or annoying move; eventually, their curious eyes would drift to their second monitor — where they usually had their AI software running anyway — and they would check the answer as one would sheepishly side-eye the solution to an interesting puzzle or homework problem. I wonder if for friendly games, just asking the players after the game would help. Game ends, and the website asks you if you played without any help or you received help. It would provide valuable statistics for the players themselves, and maybe put ratio on their profile to make it clear that noone wants to play bot users, including themselves. Same could be beneficial for semi-official online tournaments: if one clicks "I received help" she gets disqualified from that one. Even participating in a tournament could become a challenge in itself, and could help to develop good habits for later.

ericpauley

Phenomenal piece. I particularly appreciate how transparently the ideas generalize to AI coding without ever having to explicitly say it.

AndyNemmity

I watched all the Alphago games live, I've watched analysis of so many Alphago games. I think one of the particulars about Go is how hard the player base took it. Far harder than chess did. Far harder than Starcraft did (although arguably, Alphastar wasn't even that good strategy wise, it was just better mechanically even with preventions. No one has adopted almost any of Alphastar's strategy) Lee Sedol in particular was crushed by the experience. Others found optimism and opportunity in it. I don't think extrapolating the Go experience is all that useful across the board, although it does have some value, and perspective, and it was a fantastic article I enjoyed reading. Games have cheating, because cheating is easier than getting better. Before AI, there was rampant cheating. In Magic the gathering, it's shuffle cheating, or holding out cards, or whatever. The ease at which you can cheat makes more cheaters. If you can get away with it, or if it's like Go, or Chess AI, it's trivial to do, and easy to not get caught. Same with map hacking in Starcraft. I don't know. I don't have any fully formed thoughts here, except that I think extrapolating the experience in this way is vastly overstating it's generalized impacts. But I also could be very wrong. We are talking about predictions. No one can predict anything. Predictions say more about you, and your perspective, than they do about reality. But great read, enjoyed thinking about it all.