[LINK] "The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go"

[rfmcdpei]

Cade Metz' Wired article reports from Seoul, where a Google-designed AI defeated a veteran player of Seoul in a beautiful if unorthodox manner. There are new ways of knowing the world about.

At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty

Comments

[mmcirvin]

Dismay and disquiet at computers beating experts at strategy games is kind of a strange thing to me, because computers have been able to beat most ordinary people at these games for a long time. These are things that most human beings actually can't do very well. Even trying my hardest, I can be easily beaten at Go or chess by a relatively simple program that runs on a smartphone. Is it really that relevant that now a computer can also beat the best Go players in the world?

If we want to look for characteristics of humanness that are hard to automate, it might be better to look for activities where a random person off the street can currently beat any machine. And these exist, mostly having to do with human-to-human social interaction and getting by in a complex and uncontrolled environment. Even the current progress in driverless cars is very recent.

[mmcirvin]

Lee Sedol just won a match!