Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players
I sympathize.<p>It used to be that you might be able to believe that there is some kind of art behind go, some sort of abstract beauty to it, and that the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go ...<p>But the defeat of the tactics born from this mindset by MCTS at least for now lay bare the fact that the path to being good at go is actually to probabilistically sample the phase space of the game and perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ...<p>To top it off — there is almost nothing “about go” to learn from watching alpha go play ... I imagine that attempting to analyze alpha go’s victories would produce an unending sequence of the feeling of never gaining any new insight “into go”.<p>The analysis of go is now about optimizing algorithms — which _is_ interesting — but I don’t think it’s interesting for the same reasons that someone might’ve been passionate about go in the past ...