GO and AI

Goodby My Princess scene: Emperor choosing the next Crown Prince based on GO game

I had been watching Chinese ancient themed drama lately and my Youtube home page will attest to that. One thing I noticed in those dramas is this weird board game that people play during tea time or conversations. It looked insignificant to me till now. Just this night, I learned that the board game is named Go. Its the oldest board game and compared to chess it has the simplest rules. Unlike chess however, the level of difficulty of this game is hard. So hard that it took decades and the brightest mind in AI to create an algorithm that could play Go.

So why Go is so hard and why is it even of great interest aside from its an ancient board game. Go is not just a game, its a strategy game. Each move will determine the odds of winning and losing the game for a player. The number of possible move combinations you can make on a single Go game is more than the estimated atoms in the known universe. I learned all of this from the AlphaGo documentary that had beaten the top Go player in the world. Watching that documentary made me realize few things however.

1. I am happy even if human won the game 1:4 only.
2. If a game lasted for 2000 plus years and still being played, then something really interesting about it that keeps players from playing for a Millenia. In the case of Go, its the complexity of the game while playing on a very simple set of rules.
3. Human mind like simple rules in a complex game. Sounds ironic but we do.
4. I realize that AI is wonderful and scary at the same time. It has the ability to make humans scared of being beaten down by an AI. We forget that we built the AI.
5. AI can make decisions based on learnings it get from a human.
6. We train AI to have brains but not consciousness hence they are as dumb as they are intelligent.
7. I want to learn Go. The rules are simple but it will surely make me think.
8. I hope we can use AI to improve human lives and make us more intelligent not the other way around.

AI is such an interesting subject. But the human mind is a much more interesting subject and AI is just trying to imitate that. The way humans decide, cope with failures and learn is still a mystery.