AI BEATS HUMANS AT GO, SPURS MASSIVE LEAP IN PLAYER CREATIVITY!
The world of Go, an ancient and complex board game, has seen nothing short of a revolution over the last five years, propelled not by an unprecedented human genius but a creation of our own - Artificial Intelligence. DeepMind's AlphaGo, which stunned the world in May 2016 by outperforming the top human players, spurred a period of intense reevaluation of strategies and a reconsideration of what we considered to be finite game boundaries.
AI has irrefutably impacted the perceptions and performances of professional Go players. Yet interestingly, the improvements we see today are not just rote learning from AI, players haven't been merely mimicking the artificial master. Instead, the revolution has sparked a renaissance of creativity. Approximately 40 percent of players' improvement came from memorizing moves demonstrated by AlphaGo, while a larger 60 percent evolved from novel “human moves.”
This scenario is reminiscent of Roger Bannister's earth-shattering 4-minute mile, previously deemed impossible. Once Bannister showed it was within reach, the accomplishment quickly became the standard, a phenomenon we now see mirrored in the world of Go with the advent of AI. What once seemed impossible has become the norm, inspiring growth and catalyzing creativity in humans.
However, this doesn't completely annihilate the fear that AI may eventually displace humans in various tasks. That concern does, indeed, persist. But for now, instead of replacing humans, AI appears to be helping us push the realm of possibilities further and delivering an unexpected stimulant to human ingenuity.
The remarkable shift in Go transpired 18 months after the AlphaGo shock, coinciding superbly with the release of Leela Zero, an open-source Go engine. It helped make the AI's cognitive process transparent, assisting players in understanding the reason behind each move. This scenario strongly resonates with the theory of cognitive apprenticeship, suggesting that making the learning process visible aids learners.
However, there's also an intriguing alternate theory proposed. It postulates that the AI and open-source tools like Leela Zero didn't necessarily improve the decision-making quality by replicating human reasoning. Instead, they have enabled players to immerse themselves completely in the data of how AI plays the game, essentially enabling them to bypass built-in heuristics.
Comparatively, a similar shift happened in the world of chess, where AI engines facilitated a transition towards pattern matching and massive input. The AI-offense in board games gives us a powerful glimpse into a future where artificial intelligence could be revolutionizing not only technology and industry but also human creativity and thought.
This process of learning, evolving, and finding innovative ways to solve problems—though sometimes by unexpected means—underscores the value of AI as a teacher as much as a tool. Ultimately, it also serves as a gentle reminder of the incalculable potential for human growth and improvement in the face of challenges, even when they are of our own creation.