Earlier this year, an amateur Go player used one of the best AI systems in the game. They did this using a strategy developed with the help of a program that the researchers designed to test systems like KataGo for weaknesses. As it turns out, the win is just one part of a broader Go renaissance that’s seeing human players get more creative since
In a recent study published in the journal , researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and Yale found that human Go players have become less predictable in recent years. As the the researchers came to that conclusion by analyzing a data set of more than 5.8 million Go moves made during professional play between 1950 and 2021. With the help of a “superhuman” Go AI, a program that can play and rate the quality of any single move, they created a statistic called a “decision quality index,” or DQI for short.
After assigning a DQI score to each move in their data set, the team found that prior to 2016, the quality of professional play improved relatively little from year to year. At most, the team saw a positive mean annual DQI change of 0.2. In some years, the overall quality of the game even declined. However, since the rise of superhuman AIs in 2018, average DQI values have changed at a rate greater than 0.7. During that same period, professional players have employed newer strategies. In 2018, 88 percent of games, up from 63 percent in 2015, saw players set up a combination of plays that hadn’t been observed before.
“Our findings suggest that the development of superhuman artificial intelligence programs may have led human players to break away from traditional strategies and induced them to explore novel moves, which in turn may have improved their decision-making,” writes the equipment.
That’s an interesting change, but not exactly unintuitive if you think about it. As Professor Stuart Russell of the University of California, Berkeley, told the new scientist“It’s not surprising that players who train against machines tend to make more moves that the machines approve of.”
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