I sense a change in the announcer's attitude towards AlphaGo. Yesterday there were a few strange moves from AlphaGo that were called mistakes; today, similar moves were called "interesting".
fun fact: when TD-Gammon hit the backgammon scene in the 90's, it didn't just defeat the top level human pros, it shattered the whole metagame and changed how humans play the game. It could be that human vs human go will look very different in the future due to what AlphaGo has learned and can teach us.
Can you recommend any reading about this that’s approachable for someone who has only a shallow understanding of the game?
For Backgammon, just search for the paper on TD-Gammon.
AlphaGo maximises the probability of winning, and not the margin by which it does. So those "mistakes" yesterday turned out to be fortifying moves because AlphaGo was confident of a win. And similarly today the weird moves were interesting because they perhaps indicated that AlphaGo thought it was ahead.
Yeah, that explanation from the DeepMind team member today put a whole new spin on some of the 'odd' late game moves. It doesn't 'care' about about margins so it will shore up its odds of a win in preference to increasing the margin if it wins.
that's very interesting exlanation.. do you have the link to the interview of the DeepMind team?
I had a feeling after yesterday's win that people might be tempted to call it a close win by AlphaGo and predict that Lee could overtake it with a bit better play, but that we'd find no matter how good Lee played, AlphaGo would adjust and continue to come out just a bit more on top. It's actually probably really hard to tell how much better AlphaGo is because it probably plays quite conservatively overall and hides a lot of potential strength.