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After AI beat them, professional go players got better and more creative

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For many decades, it seemed professional Go players had reached a hard limit on how well it is possible to play. They were not getting better. Decision quality was largely plateaued from 1950 to the mid-2010s: Then, in May 2016, DeepMind demonstrated AlphaGo, an AI that could beat the best human Go players. This is how the humans reacted: After a few years, the weakest professional players were better than the strongest players before AI. The strongest players pushed beyond what had been thought possible. Or were they cheating by using the AI? No.1 They really were getting better. And it wasn’t simply that they imitated the AI, in a mechanical way. They got more creative, too. There was an uptick in historically novel moves and sequences. Shin et al calculate about 40 percent of the improvement came from moves that could have been memorized by studying the AI. But moves that deviated from what the AI would do also improved, and these “human moves” accounted for 60 percent of the improv

After AI beat them, professional Go players got better and more creative Henrik Karlsson Jan 23, 2024 150 35 24 Share A game of the board game Go in Japan 1876 For many decades, it seemed professional Go players had reached a hard limit on how well it is possible to play. They were not getting better. Decision quality was largely plateaued from 1950 to the mid-2010s: Then, in May 2016, DeepMind demonstrated AlphaGo, an AI that could beat the best human Go players. This is how the humans reacted: Source . After a few years, the weakest professional players were better than the strongest players

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