8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

&gt; Go is a deeply complex strategic game — famously far more complicated than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible board configurations.<p>The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much, or to be exact [1]:<p>208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935<p>Indeed far larger than the ~ 4.8 x 10^44 legal chess positions [2], that is in between the number of legal 9x9 and 10x10 Go positions.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tromp.github.io&#x2F;go&#x2F;legal.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tromp.github.io&#x2F;go&#x2F;legal.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tromp.github.io&#x2F;chess&#x2F;chess.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tromp.github.io&#x2F;chess&#x2F;chess.htm</a>

To my knowledge AlphaGo models never became meaningfully available to the public, but 8 years later the KataGo project has open source, superhuman Go AI models freely available and under ongoing development [1]. The open source projects that developed in the wake of AlphaGo and AlphaZero are a huge success story in my mind.<p>I haven&#x27;t played Go in a while, but I&#x27;m kind of excited to try going back to use the KataGo-based analysis&#x2F;training tools that exist now.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lightvector&#x2F;KataGo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lightvector&#x2F;KataGo</a>

Google&#x27;s documentary on AlphaGo <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y</a><p>Truly a must watch! (just look at the video comments to be convinced)

I know there are Go channels in Korea for watching professional matches... are there any for watching AIs face off against each other?

I can&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s been 8 years.

Great PR for Google from Lee! It totally isn&#x27;t mostly for advancing Google&#x27;s commercial interests, the bottom line being:<p>&quot;I believe that humans can partner with AI and make great progress. As long as we can set clear principles and standards for it, I am quite optimistic about the future of AI technology in our daily lives.&quot;<p>I hope he got paid well.

<p><pre><code> I thought it would be an easy victory I ... ended up only winning one out of our five games </code></pre> It&#x27;s interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over. And a few years later, no human can compete anymore.<p>I think we are in a similar situation in multiple professions today. For example with self-driving.<p>Musk recently said, that other car manufacturers are not much interested in talks about licensing FSD because they don&#x27;t think it can work.<p>In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers anymore.