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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

#61

Post by arcticfox »

Ntrails wrote: post #41
joe_the_user wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's solely a matter of raw strength, but as Shin said, a willingness not to play to the program's strengths. I mean, one thing that rankled me about original Lee Sedol match was that Lee had no access to the program's "record" while the machine by the nature of the AI training process had effectively studied Lee's games in great detail. I recall a while back someone came up with a set of "anti-computer…

I saw the same things when the OpenAI Dota bots could eviscerate humans 1v1 - even pros lost! Until a more average player confuses the AI with an unseen behaviour (pulling creeps between the towers etc) to get an advantage.

We saw this with AlphaStar too, but ultimately it feels like simply an exploit. I expect even a relatively simple modern LLM/model working with the custom transformer would have been able to address these exploits after a game.

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

#62

Post by mellosouls »

The article is hilariously triumphalist given the AI had a handicap (which it only mentions in passing unlike the title here).

Obviously its an impressive human intellectual feat but the hubris is instructive perhaps for our wider interactions with AI as its abilities accelerate around us.

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

#63

Post by rao-v »

hyperpape wrote: post #37
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 o…

The problem is ambient go knowledge. A top 100 player would easily beat time traveling Lee Changho in his first few matchups. Of course give peak Lee Changho a fortnight to prep with Katago and … well that would be something!

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

#64

Post by kadoban »

rudi-c wrote: post #14
kadoban wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

There are tweaks to move choice like that, but it's all evaluation time. None of that happens in training. Zero times in the RL loop does katago see a two stone game against a weaker player.

You can kind of tweak towards play this metric or that, but it's not the same.

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

#65

Post by kadoban »

thataccount wrote: post #53

I don't know what the fascination with these AI versus human tournaments is. I'm old enough to remember the whole "Deep Blue" vs Kasparov exhibition, and I didn't really understand the fascination with all that either. That humans can make sufficiently strong calculators has never been a dispute in my mind. If the human wins over the calculator, good, but if the calculator wins, okay. What does that tell us exactly?…

> That humans can make sufficiently strong calculators has never been a dispute in my mind.

Within our lifetimes (unless you're quite young) it was doubtful if a go ai would ever beat a decent human. Same was true for chess a generation or two earlier. It's news because it's the handoff of man to machine being the best at a particular thing.

This current news is news from the other way, this human did _exceptionally_ well.

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

#66

Post by teleforce »

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…

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

English is not my first language but for clarity perhaps the title should be:

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

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

#67

Post by rao-v »

joe_the_user wrote: post #29
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 don't think it's solely a matter of raw strength, but as Shin said, a willingness not to play to the program's strengths. I mean, one thing that rankled me about original Lee Sedol match was that Lee had no access to the program's "record" while the machine by the nature of the AI training process had effectively studied Lee's games in great detail. I recall a while back someone came up with a set of "anti-computer…

In a march 2026 interview David Wu (lightvector, Katago’s creator at Jane Street) noted that he doesn’t have a systematic solution for the cyclic group problem, but adding examples to the training set mostly ensures Katago during MCT rollout figures it out. I don’t think there has been a post mid 2024 verified exploit.

https://gomagic.org/david-wu-on-building-katago/

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

#69

Post by Ntrails »

arcticfox wrote: post #61
Ntrails wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw the same things when the OpenAI Dota bots could eviscerate humans 1v1 - even pros lost! Until a more average player confuses the AI with an unseen behaviour (pulling creeps between the towers etc) to get an advantage.

We saw this with AlphaStar too, but ultimately it feels like simply an exploit. I expect even a relatively simple modern LLM/model working with the custom transformer would have been able to address these exploits after a game.

I don't think exploit is the right term?

Anyway. Yes if you throw examples into training it will be able to handle the situation - but handling unseen things for me is a key goal.

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