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Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

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11–20 of 186 posts

Re: Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

#11
post #5

It’s worth understanding that Shin Jinse has been significantly stronger than his nearest human opponents for a while now, more so than Magnus was even at his very peak. In go ELO like scoring he’s something like 120 points over the next strongest player. No other player has ever broken a 3800 rating let alone 3850. Ke Jie (the previous long time champion) peaked at 3755. Shin Jinseo’s strength graph is the most absu…

Deep link to Shin Jinseo's strength graph

https://www.goratings.org/en/players/1313.html

Re: Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

#12
post #5

It’s worth understanding that Shin Jinse has been significantly stronger than his nearest human opponents for a while now, more so than Magnus was even at his very peak. In go ELO like scoring he’s something like 120 points over the next strongest player. No other player has ever broken a 3800 rating let alone 3850. Ke Jie (the previous long time champion) peaked at 3755. Shin Jinseo’s strength graph is the most absu…

For a non-Go player, do you think this trend will persist, or is it more of a dead-cat/human bounce?

Re: Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

#13
post #4

Apparently 2 stones is a huge advantage. An estimate is that the computer is roughly 4-600 ELO stronger on an even match. Also, the human played a strategy tailored to that huge initial advantage. He said that the AI did not handle this particularly well, and played high probability moves instead of trying to lure him into a mistake. Also, even though this was the best Go engine, it was not running on a supercomputer…

> So, this was an important victory for a human, but not a sign that humans are now stronger than AIs at Go.

Another way to look at this: Go's handicap system gives us a genuinely interesting metric for the distance between a human and a machine at this specific game. Instead of just "computers beat humans" we get a quantified gap.

Re: Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

#14
post #9
post #4

Apparently 2 stones is a huge advantage. An estimate is that the computer is roughly 4-600 ELO stronger on an even match. Also, the human played a strategy tailored to that huge initial advantage. He said that the AI did not handle this particularly well, and played high probability moves instead of trying to lure him into a mistake. Also, even though this was the best Go engine, it was not running on a supercomputer…

> Also, the human played a strategy tailored to that huge initial advantage. He said that the AI did not handle this particularly well, and played high probability moves instead of trying to lure him into a mistake. Yeah, katago's training is not really focused at all on handicap games, because it's by nature learning from even games against similar-strength opponents. It doesn't have specific training from playing i…

While AlphaGo originally only had win rate as a metric, modern Go AIs have more knobs, including an evaluation of "complexity".

Just stating this off the top of my head so I could be misremembering, but I heard that the KataGo settings used were tweaked to favor complexity. This was most apparent in Game 1 which Shin Jinseo lost, where the AI had an unusual opening. However, the last game was quite plain leading me to wonder whether that setting was present in the last game (or at all).

Re: Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

#15
post #5

It’s worth understanding that Shin Jinse has been significantly stronger than his nearest human opponents for a while now, more so than Magnus was even at his very peak. In go ELO like scoring he’s something like 120 points over the next strongest player. No other player has ever broken a 3800 rating let alone 3850. Ke Jie (the previous long time champion) peaked at 3755. Shin Jinseo’s strength graph is the most absu…

For a non-Go player, do you think this trend will persist, or is it more of a dead-cat/human bounce?

On one hand, Shin Jinseo is an outlier player of this generation. On the other hand, the newest generation of new pros will have exclusively learned by using the AI to tell them what the best move is, so there's reason to believe that peak human level has yet to be reached.

Re: Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

#16
In Go, there are exchanges of plays called "joseki". Professionals consider the outcome of joseki to be an equal result for both players. Most joseki are only a handful of moves, but some, such as the "flying knife" joseki have variations that continue for upwards of 50 moves. A traditional 19x19 go board has 361 intersections.

Shin's genius was to play out a complex variation of the flying knife joseki that was, in essence, a one-way path to reach an equal board position that occupied about 1/4 of the board. Due to the 2-stone handicap, the position favoured black with the game ~25% complete. KataGo could not have played any other way, where a human may have tried to foil the plan by introducing further complications.

What was truly incredible was how Shin held the advantage from that point on.

Re: Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

#18
KataGo isn't very good at exploiting weaker opponents. In chess people were convinced a grandmaster can never be beaten with a knight odds. It's just too easy to simplify the position and win. It was very easy (for a grandmaster) vs already super human Stockfish. It was still kinda easy (for a strong GM) vs 200+ ELO stronger NNUE Stockfish. And then someone made a net optimized for exploiting humans. Its games are amazing and it beats GMs with knight odds with ease. It's unreal how good it is at setting traps, playing lines that don't work in theory but the refutation is based on precise tactical sequence a few moves deep. Playing vs it feels like playing vs a spider that slowly weaves a net around you till you can't move anymore.

I predict the same thing is going to happen in Go once the engines catch up.

(You can play those chess bots on Lichess for free. Challenge LeelaQueenOdds or LeelaRookOdds if you are master level or stronger)

Re: Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

#20
post #5

It’s worth understanding that Shin Jinse has been significantly stronger than his nearest human opponents for a while now, more so than Magnus was even at his very peak. In go ELO like scoring he’s something like 120 points over the next strongest player. No other player has ever broken a 3800 rating let alone 3850. Ke Jie (the previous long time champion) peaked at 3755. Shin Jinseo’s strength graph is the most absu…

For a non-Go player, do you think this trend will persist, or is it more of a dead-cat/human bounce?

Could someone sufficiently motivated invest in training Katago to be able to beat Shin Jinseo with 3 stones of handicap? Unfortunately - probably yes.

This in no way detracts from how absurd and remarkable it is that Shin Jinseo can beat KataGo (it gets a LOT of training and architecture refinements https://katagotraining.org/#eloGraphButtons) with 2 stones of handicap.

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