Tuesday, August 16, 2005
June 27th, it is reported that Michael Adams, ranked top seven chess grandmaster in the world lost to the Hydra supercomputer. With a draw in six games and heavy losses in five, the world saw the proclaimation of man is dead- long live the machine.
In the game of igo, weiqi or baduk, there are plenty of computer programmers wishing to create the 'perfect' go player. KGS itself provides a haven for go bots, from 'play at rules level' 30k Idiot and simplebot, to 12 and 13k Gnugo bots which can provide a fair challenge to single digit kyus. So far that's the limit- 12kyu bots which even go players look down upon because these bots merely work according to joseki. A 12k bot cannot match a 12k player in a serious game, and there are always ways to beat those bots such as just playing defensively and passively. The game of go has simple rules, but is deep in the ways the various concepts can be used. Just as a player has to figure out countless moves and responses, so does the bot. Aloriless is convinced that there will come a day when someone will invent a shodan bot, one that could read moves at the level of a dan, and soon computers will take over the world of igo. To me, that day will not come, because it would mean the end of go. There is more to go that just concepts and moves. It involves intuition and passion to see the game. A player who can memorise josekis still cannot possibly hope to know the game without feeling the connection to every move, to have the intuition and awareness to his opponent. HUmans are not perfect, we make mistakes but we also see so much more about other people and about ourselves. Go is about knowing, feeling, seeing.........a bot cannot match intuition because it does not have feelings. It cannot guess at a human move because a human can be unpredictable, thus the possibilities of one move can expand to infinity. It is also the human passion which makes go so captivating. That feeling of strength and satisfaction of a good game, that can never be felt by a computer. So a computer, however strong, will forever be playing moves, not go.
Mused by Sukunami Taka around 11:28 PM
Comments:
Post a Comment