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Comment by rictic | Hacker News Reader

The version that beat Lee Sedol was trained on pro games.

Their Nature paper says "We trained the policy network p_sigma to classify positions according to expert moves played in the KGS data set. This data set contains 29.4 million positions from 160,000 games played by KGS 6 to 9 dan human players; 35.4% of the games are handicap games."

It is possible that they fed it some pro games after the Fan Hui games but before the Lee Sedol games, but that would be weird; at that point it was already learning from self-play rather than trying to match human moves.

That said, I don't think that Master's better performance comes from being trained on pro games. The AlphaGo version that played Lee Sedol played much more like a human pro than Master does.

> games played by KGS 6 to 9 dan human players

I'm confused. I thought 9-dan players were considered pro? That's the highest ranking you can get, right?

I think those servers have their own ranking system that does not match the "official" rankings (which I think cap amateurs at some lower dan rank)

This is correct. A players rank will typically differ between both server and go association. Sensei's Library holds more information: http://senseis.xmp.net/?RankWorldwideComparison

There are multiple dan scales. The KGS scale is an amateur dan scale. I don't know how much the scales overlap generally, but I'd imagine a 9 pro-dan professional to be somewhere around 12 dan on amateur scale (pro scales also have more dense scaling). However, the scales reach the ceiling at 9 dan by convention.

Even the abbreviations differ: 9d (amateur dan) vs 9p (pro dan).

KGS 9 dan players are pros or amateurs that are professional level like former insei. The highest rank is almost 11d (it still says 9d, but the graph goes even higher):

https://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=leqi

There's an Elo rating table on this Wikipedia page which pretty much corroborates/agrees with this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings

Got a source? I can only find references to training on amateur games (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol#Alpha...)

No, but I'm pretty sure the parent post is right. Pro games were included.

Edit: I'm not actually that sure. I'm asking around right now (with go players, not DeepMind people).

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