AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5
As someone who studied AI in college and am a reasonably good amateur player, I have been following the matches between Lee and AlphaGo.<p>AlphaGo plays some unusual moves that go clearly against any classically trained Go players. Moves that simply don&#x27;t quite fit into the current theories of Go playing, and the world&#x27;s top players are struggling to explain what&#x27;s the purpose&#x2F;strategy behind them.<p>I&#x27;ve been giving it some thought. When I was learning to play Go as a teenager in China, I followed a fairly standard, classical learning path. First I learned the rules, then progressively I learn the more abstract theories and tactics. Many of these theories, as I see them now, draw analogies from the physical world, and are used as tools to hide the underlying complexity (chunking), and enable the players to think at a higher level.<p>For example, we&#x27;re taught of considering connected stones as one unit, and give this one unit attributes like dead, alive, strong, weak, projecting influence in the surrounding areas. In other words, much like a standalone army unit.<p>These abstractions all made a lot of sense, and feels natural, and certainly helps game play -- no player can consider the dozens (sometimes over 100) stones all as individuals and come up with a coherent game play. Chunking is such a natural and useful way of thinking.<p>But watching AlphaGo, I am not sure that&#x27;s how it thinks of the game. Maybe it simply doesn&#x27;t do chunking at all, or maybe it does chunking its own way, not influenced by the physical world as we humans invariably do. AlphaGo&#x27;s moves are sometimes strange, and couldn&#x27;t be explained by the way humans chunk the game.<p>It&#x27;s both exciting and eerie. It&#x27;s like another intelligent species opening up a new way of looking at the world (at least for this very specific domain). and much to our surprise, it&#x27;s a new way that&#x27;s more powerful than ours.