A simple board game
First weekend into COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, I stumbled upon a documentary on YouTube published by Google. It was a chronicling of the events of March 2016 and the effort before, for the team at Deepmind, the pioneering Artificial Intelligence start up that was acquired by Google. Beating expectations by nearly a decade, Deepmind had created a program named AlphaGo that plays the nearly 4000 year old Chinese boardgame named Weiqi.
Also known in Korea as Baduk and in Japan (and popularized around the world) as Go. The rules of Go are very simple, it is a board game where two players alternately place black and white stones on a 19×19 grid, aiming to control the most territory. Stones are captured by surrounding them on all four orthogonal sides. The game ends when both players pass consecutively, and the player with the most surrounded territory plus captured stones wins. Whilst having a simple premise the game supposedly has more possibilites to play than there are atoms on earth.
Which lead to the question. Can a computer play Go? And more importantly, can a computer beat the world champion of the game?
What came next was the modern day equivalent of Deep Blue vs Kasparov – when AlphaGo was challenging the 18 time world champion, Lee Sedol – best of 5 game tournament at Go in March 2016. Lee Sedol was confident and the entire nation of Korea that rallied behind him were certain that it would be a clean sweep for the world champion. The outcome was the opposite, as Lee Sedol ended up losing the tourney 4-1. Media were shocked after the first game when Lee Sedol lost to a computer, but technology nerds rejoiced at the progress made by Deepmind. The inability for Lee Sedol “to read his opponent” and the lack of human characteristics of fatigue, anxiousness, stress, etc. made AlphaGo a truly difficult opponnent.
"One time was enough"
But Lee Sedol did manage to win a game, specifically game 4 of the tourney. As the game progressed, AlphaGo kept pace with the moves from Lee Sedol until at a certain point, after much contemplation, Lee Sedol played Move 78, a wedge move on the board that created such a high level of complexity that AlphaGo began to falter. Several moves later AlphaGo resigned leaving Lee Sedol and the rest of humanity to celebrate his victory. Yes, rest of humanity is an accurate way of saying it as in his post match press conference, Lee says, “People felt helplessness and fear. It seemed we humans are so weak and fragile. And this victory meant we could still hold our own. As time goes on, it might be very difficult to beat AI. But winning this one time, it felt like it was enough. One time was enough”.
Commentators called Move 78 “the God’s move” as it had a less than 1 in 10,000 probability of being played at that stage, but Lee Sedol thought it was the only obvious move. With divinity having supposedly intervened itself, Move 78 was the computer nerd’s equivalent of the ‘Hand of God‘, albeit with much lesser controversy yet an astronomically higher consequence.
To put things into perspective, AlphaGo is a computer that has enormous computational power, million lines of code, 30 of the best AI scientists working on it, and it has been trained for several years playing itself and learning from countless games of Go that were played by several world champions and players through the years. For Lee Sedol to beat this machine, is the same as a human being out running a Ferrari in a 100m race. Yes, Ferraris will improve and be faster, and be more aerodynamic and be the pinnacle of automobile engineering in the years to come, but there was once a man on a cloudy afternoon in March 2016, who beat it in a race.
We can make a difference
The message from Lee Sedol and this singluar victory against the emerging Artificial intelligence and its various manifestations (think Chat GPT) is that human intelligence will always have importance and value no matter how much machines grow. This message of hope is captured through the singular Move 78 that was enough to rise up against the all conquering machine that is AlphaGo. I wanted my blog to showcase that no matter how the world will evolve tomorrow, what humans write, say, and speak will make a difference. We are enough. We can make a difference.
If you haven’t watched this documentary already, I thoroughly recommend you do so by clicking here.