rationalskepticism.org

At yesterday’s post-game press conference, Lee looked shell-shocked. Today he seemed resigned. One reporter asked what AlphaGo’s weaknesses are? Lee laughed: “Well, I guess I lost the game because I wasn’t able to find out.”

The win sent shock waves through the Go community. “When I saw the games, I was very surprised because the computer was playing like a human,” says Hajin Lee, secretary general of the International Go Federation in Tokyo. “If you had not told me, I could not tell from the moves which one was the computer.”

Then came a process of acceptance. “To me it was a relief,” says Frank Lantz, the director of the New York University Game Center in New York City and an enthusiastic Go amateur. “Go had become this mythic bulwark against artificial intelligence. People got used to this proverb: ‘Yes, computers can play chess but they can’t play Go.’ I don’t think it was ever true. We can finally put away the last self-delusion that there is some magical quality to Go that makes it intrinsically human.”

In games, human exceptionalism may hold out a while longer in poker. Computers are already close to playing mathematically optimal strategies in some versions of two-handed poker. But good human poker players possess an extra skill: the ability to read opponents’ weaknesses—their deviations from an optimal strategy—and exploit them. Computers can’t do that yet, but in principle it’s just the sort of thing a deep neural net ought to be able to master, says Nikolai Yakovenko of Twitter New York in New York City, a former poker pro who is working on artificial-intelligence poker software. Then another bastion will fall.