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Comment by denim_chicken | Hacker News Reader

So I suppose the fact that the opponent is a computer program should not be factored into the reaction to Sedol's win at all.

I hope your reductionist explanation is not accurate because it would imply that we are already so highly conditioned to machines and to AI that this match is thought to be no different from a match between two humans.

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The machine beat him 3 times and was more or less expected to win again. It didn't, which would imply that Sedol played an exceptionally good game. Seems pretty obvious to me.

You're acting like following arbitrary sets of rules to maximize a value function isn't something that computers excel at. The only thing that was holding up computers for Go was simply time; there were too many possibilities to consider. Humans are really, really good at heuristically trimming possibilities, but sometimes to the detriment of finding maxima.

You know that computers beating us at chess allowed us to get better at chess, right?

Fan Hui, the professional player they beat late last year, already improved his game by quite a bit from the occasional match with AlphaGo (deepmind hired him as a consultant to test). He's won every single game in the last European championship, and moved from around top 600th player in the world to around top 300.

Wow. I know nothing about go, but 600--->300 sounds like quite an improvement.

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