Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

From my perspective, cyborg chess is about playing the best game of chess in all time... only stopping once we have discovered "the perfect game" (aka: proving that White-wins, Black-wins, or a Draw is always possible with perfect play)

The computers currently playing Chess, and Go, are incredibly powerful. But they are far from perfect. People have constantly found weaknesses in chess playing programs over the past 20 years, and as a result, have improved chess programs significantly.

Go has only had 2-years in its "cyborg" state, where we can finally use computers as a methodology of exploring the game state.

That's not what MCTS means.

MCTS refers to the bandit problem which formulated the search parameters. MCTS always chooses the "most interesting" path to explore. (Where "most interesting" is the path that balances explore-and-exploit hyper-parameters).

AlphaZero improved upon MCTS by deferring to the neural net as the hyper-parameter. But AlphaZero, for a given network on a given board-state, will ALWAYS choose the same position as "most interesting".

Turning AlphaZero from its current deterministic form into a random form would be an easy fix. But its just one example of how AlphaZero really isn't designed for competitive use yet (despite playing the best game of Go of all time). Instead of picking the top #1 move, maybe you randomly pick from the top 3 moves... or some other scheme.

Maybe someday it will be possible if we can solve the hard problem of consciousness in conjunction with quantum computing, etc.

Though I do still agree in thinking there is likely a deeper theory yet uncovered.

This is why AI is more significant to Go than horses and cars are to running.

It's easy for humans to build machines that enable them to travel faster than they could run, but it has zero impact on running as a sport. The existence of cars doesn't change how runners run. But the existence of AI does change how Go players play.

Now that AI is more powerful than human players in chess, it is no longer possible to reach the top of human performance in chess without AI. That's why this is so significant. It's not that a human can't beat the AI. It's that a human can't beat another human without learning from the AI. You simply can't play chess at the highest levels anymore without playing cyborg chess. This is different from the impact of other machines on other sports.

But I disagree with you on the comparison to how we use the internet to enhance our other abilities, such as programming. Computers help us be better programmers, but they can't replace us. AI completely replaces humans as a Go player. The human is no longer needed at all.

I can see this causing a significantly different psychological response. In effect, a human trying to become the best chess player or best go player they can become is trying to more and more closely emulate a computer that they will never actually reach parity with. Another commenter noted that "A Professional Go player is an explorer of truth in a millenarian board", but this is less and less true as AI improves. All knowledge about the best way to play Go was previously gained by humans. In 20 years, humans will probably be meaningless on driving knowledge of perfect Go playing.

Chess players today rely on playing moves which their opponents don't expect and haven't trained on as much as they rely on outplaying their opponents. If there is a perfect chess game or a perfect go game, humans are not going to help find it anymore.

So AI doesn't make it that humans can't meaningfully compete in games such as chess and go, but it does change how they compete. We no longer drive the pursuit of perfect play as "explorers of truth". We no longer learn primarily from each other, we learn by imitating the more powerful, yet unmatchable, AIs. And we no longer compete primarily on sheer expertise in the game. We have to, in some sense, include trick plays that work by exploiting the humanity of our opponents rather than playing for a platonic ideal of the game and seeing who is better from that perspective.

AI has fundamentally and irreversibly altered these games, and I think it's appropriate in some sense to mourn the loss, regardless of our feelings on the new reality we live in.