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Comment by conanbatt | Hacker News Reader

Hey Inufu. I just replayed the games and have to say that the first game the bot shows very high quality plays.

The next two games, it seems like Fan Hui did not perform as well as the first (as opposed to the computer being clearly better than him). Where the games played in a row?

Regardless, I'm looking forward to the games with Lee Sedol. I studied in his school in Korea, and personally know how hard it is to get to that level.

My assessment is that the bot from those games will NOT beat Lee Sedol. So train it hard for march :)

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I've just replayed them as well.

You can see that in the first game the bot played really solidly without risk-taking and didn't want to lose even a few stones. You could say that it played very conservatively but solidly. It won by a tiny margin (2.5) so Fan Hui probably concluded that the bot would win every game by a similar small margin if he didn't change the style of play. I'm sure that in the first game Fan Hui was sounding the bot out for strengths and weaknesses, seeing if it knew all the tesujis and josekis and whatnot.

So from then on you see Fan Hui trying to mix it up and play more aggressively and what is very interesting is that he got outplayed in every game, even to the point of losing a big group and resigning.

So - if you play conservatively and tentatively and solidly it'll beat you by a sliver, if you try to out-think it it'll nail you. At least at the 2dan pro level.

I'd be hesitant for calling a Lee Sedol victory ahead of time. We know that in chess Kasparov beat IBM's bot initially but then IBM tweaked and within a couple of years the bot was too strong. Even though go is much harder than chess I predict that if Google lose this time and if they don't lose by much they'll win the time after that.

Kasparov claimed that when IBM's team won against him they cheated.

Is it even possible to cheat at a perfect information game?

The claim is that, in some cases, the human operators of Deep Blue intervened and played a different move than what the computer indicated (https://www.chess.com/blog/clizaw/did-ibm-cheat-kasparov)

So, yes, you can cheat in a perfect information game.

Nonsense. The operators were weaker than Deep Blue, and Kasparov's reasons for thinking there was cheating are absurd and not based on evidence.

Here, cheated doesn't mean "cheated at chess", but rather "cheated at having the computer play Kasparov unaided"

So what if he claimed it? It's not a credible claim, and in any case the current top chess programs are far stronger.

The games were all played on separate days. As Fan Hui mentioned in the video, he changed his strategy after the first game to fight more, so that may explain why it seems his performance changed.

This bot has a very flexible style. It is at ease both in calm point-grabbing positions (first game) and large-scale dogfights (see the second one), where humans used to crush computers. Lee Sedol is so strong at fighting, this is gonna be a great match between touch opponents.

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