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

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

#31

Post by devy »

rao-v wrote: 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…

> Katago (almost certainly significantly stronger than AlphaGo)

Interesting KataGo is an open sourced Go program written primarily by David Wu in C++ and recently heavily vibe coded by Claude. It's running on four Nvidia RTX-3090 GPUs with 96GB VRAM. [1]

[1] https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

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

#32

Post by zelphirkalt »

rao-v wrote: 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…

I read this comment before looking at the article and thought that the grandmaster beat the AI even giving the AI 2 stones. Too bad. But this way around is of course more realistic.

And of course you would need to take into consideration the scale of go ratings and chess ratings when making that comparison. With top chess ratings being around 2800, being 1000 less than the top go ratings, one would have to apply a factor of roughly 3/4.

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

#33

Post by hyperpape »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #32
rao-v wrote: 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…

I read this comment before looking at the article and thought that the grandmaster beat the AI even giving the AI 2 stones. Too bad. But this way around is of course more realistic. And of course you would need to take into consideration the scale of go ratings and chess ratings when making that comparison. With top chess ratings being around 2800, being 1000 less than the top go ratings, one would have to apply a fa…

If you scaled Shin Jinseo to 2800, you would have players with extremely negative ratings. This page shows ratings of European players on a roughly aligned scale: https://europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/createalleuro3.php?country.... It still has negative numbers on it, and this only contains players who have attended a tournament (though it's more common for beginners to play tournaments in the west, since it's hard to find times to play).

It's not a comparison of the worth of the games (I play both, though I'm better at Go, and prefer it), but the dynamic range of Go is larger.

That said, any cross-game/sport comparisons of this kind are pretty tough to do properly.

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

#34

Post by hyperpape »

devy wrote: post #31
rao-v wrote: 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…

> Katago (almost certainly significantly stronger than AlphaGo) Interesting KataGo is an open sourced Go program written primarily by David Wu in C++ and recently heavily vibe coded by Claude. It's running on four Nvidia RTX-3090 GPUs with 96GB VRAM. [1] [1] https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

It significantly predates Claude, and has been one of, if not the best engine in the world for many years.

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

#35

Post by PenanceAU »

The headline is a bit misleading, though perhaps not intentionally.

Shin took a 2-stone handicap from KataGo which means that Shin is the weaker of the two. But to give that more context, Shin is also the strongest human player to have ever lived in raw strength terms by a good margin, and is known as replicating AI move-for-move more closely than anyone else.

If they were to play even then there’s no chance any human could win (and pretty much all pros agree with that). Lee Sedol beating AlphaGo in game 4 of that series is largely considered the last time a human beat a modern AI in an even game, which is why it was so amazing.

RE the game, Katago was set to use the strongest available model and ran on a 3x 3090 GPU system, which is a lot for KataGo. 20 seconds might sound like a handicap, but that’s over 100,000 play out variations which is essentially infinite for modern KataGo models (anything over 10,000 is overkill).

Shin played well in all games, but his strategy was to avoid complexity. KataGo reads out complex fighting like an absolute monster, so Shin was trying to play very very solid and very very calm so as to not give KataGo an in.

The 2-stone handicap could be thought of as roughly 10-15 points of ‘buffer’. That’s massive in professional games, and that’s what Shin used to win. He played so overly solid that it sometimes cost a point or two, but it removed an opening for Katago to fight. He did this at the key opening and middle-game sections and never burnt through the full buffer of handicap points in the last two games. That’s why those games look kinda ‘boring’, it’s because Shin wanted them to be that way.

Also note that KataGo probably could have won if its ’variance’ was tuned higher (basically it taking risks). Standard KataGo won’t take risks, it just wins with brute force. For handicap games though you can tune its willingness to start fights higher to prevent people from just playing ultra solid (like Shin did).

Shin did an absolutely amazing job and he deserves all the recognition. Katago routinely beats professionals giving them 3-4 stones of handicap, so the win by Shin highlights to me how strong he is, but also just how well he understands how the AI ‘thinks’.

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

#36

Post by masfuerte »

devy wrote: post #31
rao-v wrote: 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…

> Katago (almost certainly significantly stronger than AlphaGo) Interesting KataGo is an open sourced Go program written primarily by David Wu in C++ and recently heavily vibe coded by Claude. It's running on four Nvidia RTX-3090 GPUs with 96GB VRAM. [1] [1] https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

I had to read your comment five times thinking "how it is written in C++ if it's a go program?" Do'h!

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

#37

Post by hyperpape »

rao-v wrote: 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…

You're right that Shin Jinseo is a generational talent, and more dominant than anyone since Lee Changho (peaked in the 90s and was strong into the early-mid 2000s).

However, you can't compare goratings over time, the top ranks are not nearly stable enough. https://www.goratings.org/en/history/ (I think it's believable Shin Jinseo is better than Lee Changho, but not that there has been steady progress since the days of Lee Changho, so that there are now 20 players stronger than him).

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

#39

Post by TylerE »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #32
rao-v wrote: 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…

I read this comment before looking at the article and thought that the grandmaster beat the AI even giving the AI 2 stones. Too bad. But this way around is of course more realistic. And of course you would need to take into consideration the scale of go ratings and chess ratings when making that comparison. With top chess ratings being around 2800, being 1000 less than the top go ratings, one would have to apply a fa…

Depends on what chess rating you're talking about. Online at fast time controls, where many many more games get played at than OTB classical, the top super GMs are rated in the 3400-3600 range.

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

#40

Post by ggm »

I recommend "The Master of Go" by Kawabata, 1951. It's a beautiful story of the change of power at the apex of the Go ranking system. I read it the same year as I read "The Glass Bead Game" by Hesse published in 1943 and its hard not to believe a relationship but in truth I think they are completely independent stories of the same situational tension.
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