The Divine Move
As I write this, AlphaGo has played two games against Lee Sedol, one of the top Go players in the world. It won both of them by resignation, and it looks increasingly difficult for Lee to win any of the games left in this series.
This impressive performance by an algorithm, or more accurately, set of algorithms, has taken the Go world by storm. Until very recently, it was assumed that eventually machines would play Go better than humans, but that we had at least ten more years of human superiority. It’s also remarkable that DeepMind, the Google-acquired research lab that developed AlphaGo, just started working on it two years ago. Of course, it’s built on top of the work of many computer scientists over the years who have paved the way for such a thing to exist, and also on top of the work of thousands of amateur and professional Go players whose matches AlphaGo has learned from. But still: very, very impressive.
Not only Lee Sedol is completely taken aback by the level of play of AlphaGo; most (I suppose all) pros are. Ke Jie, a young Chinese prodigy (who is currently playing better than Lee Sedol), said when watching the second match that he felt like throwing up. “The gap between man and machine is too big,” he remarked.
So there is no doubt now that AlphaGo, in its current state, is already better than any human. And it will keep on improving. This is a good thing for Go: now we have a tool —shall we say, a super sensei— that can help us improve, discovering new plays, tactics, and strategies. It will revitalise a game that’s been around for centuries. It will also spark interest for more people to learn to play it.
However, there’s something that has been bugging me since this second match ended: the so-called divine move will no longer be attained by a human. If it exists, chances are AlphaGo or another artificial intelligence will find it first.
The divine move, a concept I first came across with when reading the (surprisingly good) manga Hikaru no Go, is the notion of the perfect play, something that every serious player should strive to attain in every match. It is, like any good ideal, probably unattainable, but you should still look for it.
It seems to me that the implications of this are profound: we won’t be the ones who will get to play Go at god level, but a creation of ours will. We created the concept of god —a being superior to us— and now we’re literally creating a superior being. It’s a bittersweet feeling, knowing that our limits will be overcome by our own creations.
