Alpha Go Hasn’t Killed The Game

Although Alpha Go defeated the world’s best Go player, that isn’t the end of the story.

It would seem at first that since Alpha Go defeated the world’s best Go player (and since Go is the most difficult of board games), that’s the end of the story — that there’s nothing interesting left in “human versus machine” when it comes to Go. But Go has a handicap system that enables players of different strengths to still have an interesting game. The smallest handicap is the first move — whoever places the first stone on the board has a slight advantage. Thereafter, additional stones are placed on the board by Black, the weaker player, in standard positions before play commences. The number of stones is the measure of the handicap.

So someone playing against Alpha Go could be given handicap stones. The beauty of this arrangement is that the handicap can be graded. Even a beginner could probably defeat Alpha Go with a 25-stone handicap. So a human player could have an interesting and competitive game against Alpha Go just by setting the handicap appropriately. And unlike chess, starting with a handicap does not ruin the spirit of the game.