Chess was conquered by computers a long long time (in computer time) ago and the popularity of chess has only gone up, not down. There are many professionals making a living out of chess. The art of Go will live on for sure.
Sure, Catan is also easily solvable, but its played for fun.
When you play as a professional you make a commitment to the board, to advance and explore the frontiers of the universe contained in the game. If the bot explores better than you every single time, you are just dedicating your life to trying to beat a calculator at arithmetics.
Go has something amazing about how we study pattenrs that are 100's of years old. Many current and active training materiels have up to 400 years old!
Go is something were each generation looks at the previous one and builds on that, and its been a very old and iterative process. If go becomes an exercise by how little we lose to machines for, its a major degradation of the purpose of continuing that history.
As a pro, you are just working towards the inevitable goal of solving the game, and then we are all free to never play that damn game ever again :)
I don't know. My perspective is likely decidedly odd, as I've read a great deal of far-future science fiction and done AI research and have already spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be human when machines will inevitably outperform us all in every way. The key, I think, is that there still are - will always be - things for us to enjoy. We can always find achievement in our own accomplishments, even if they're insignificant next to what someone or something else can do. I don't care that I run slower than a supercar; I take satisfaction in being able to run faster than I could yesterday. Not all is lost. :)
Moreover, as OP says, there are subjects where machine are absolutely nowhere and those subjects already do matter : world peace, ethics, etc. These are so human... Even if you had a world of machines (à la matrix), these questions would be of the utmost importance to us humans because that's an emanation of what we are.
That machine, could indeed think like us.
But if you think programs, neural networks and big data, I'ma afraid we are very far away of anything close to a machine than can think about ethics. Ethics is not a mathematical problem, it has to do with gut feelings, culture, bodies, etc. And I don't see anybody with the smallest idea on how to teach that to a computer, other than in very toyish way (such as a Tamagochi)
That said, this line of thinking is coming under attack on several fronts. AlphaGo is a good example - it's tacking problems where we're not good enough at coming up with heuristics. So, essentially, we've hit a tier where machines are really better at that topic than we are. Think about that for a second; a computer is a better programmer than the best of our guys, and it's early days yet. Not just running computations, but actually determining what computations to run.
Problems like Go are complex enough that if you want to have AI be good at it, you actually need to invest in the meta-level goal creation and other things that go along with it. This is happening on many levels, and researchers are actively trying to understand how exactly the human brain handles these topics (or even what consciousness is, on a practical level).
If you follow these developments to their logical conclusion, I'm pretty sure a "real AI" will be on the cards relatively shortly, whatever that time period may be (100 years is nothing on the grand scale). Initially, this will likely have some architectural similarities to human brains, but will essentially be free to do its own thing and restructure. Eventually, it will have gut feelings and culture that are far beyond what our feeble little brains can comprehend.
So I think AI will, as you say, reach more and more goals and we'll go the upper level with more meta stuff. But is this a road that ends on true AI or is there a "conceptual" gap ? I dunno, I think my life would be better if there was such a gap. But that's just because I love humans... Thanks for the conversation :-)
Having said that, it's much easier to see someone is on foot than to know someone isn't cheating in a chess tournament every few moves.
As for computers letting new kids on the block overtake old cultures, look at the black cab in London being overtaken by Uber. They have "The Knowldge" and Uber has a GPS.
If humans + computer beat computer, id feel pretty content as a human being.
Eventually if the game is computationally solved that will dispel,but wouldnt that happen with basically everything?
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/computers-beating-humans-at-a...
For professionals, finding usable strategies will still be a challenge, since unassisted humans are still far from solving Go or Chess. Unassisted humans have been pretty much kicked out of the top leagues, though.
That said, humans still contribute heavily. Computers may calculate a position as advantageous to one side or another, but it takes a human to explain why in heuristic terms that others can use to evaluate similar positions.
Go has something of a higher order attached, its not a sport, its a philosophy of life. Its a way to devote yourself to an art. What you do with that contribution is very important.
We could build robots that paint more and better than what we do, but as humans we are very likely to still be able to produce things computers dont. The great question is if that is true with Go as well, or effectively, its a purely tactical game and all our philosophy, ideas and beauty appreciation is basically a projection of a silly life-form over appreciating tic-tac-toe.
For some definition of paint. Namely, if you give it an image created by a human; and call the computer a printer. We are nowhere near computers creating art at the quality of humans.
>The great question is if that is true with Go as well, or effectively, its a purely tactical game and all our philosophy, ideas and beauty appreciation is basically a projection of a silly life-form over appreciating tic-tac-toe.
Is this even a question? Go is a combinatorical game. There is a solution; one of the two players has a winning strategy. The only question we are facing is if it is feasible for us to find the winning strategy (a question which AlphaGo does not help us answer). With sufficient computational power, finding the winning strategy is trivial.
This can change very quickly. Already google's machine learning with images created a sensation like a modern-day surrealist. There is technology that produces novel classical music that has been deemed undistiguishable from a human performance.
> Is this even a question? Go is a combinatorical game. There is a solution
Everything has a solution. There are no dice. With enough information you can choose what to roll everytime. With enough information you can have all the potential conceivable paintings. Perception is a combinatorial game. Physics is a combinatorial game.
Its more of a quest of identity: what can we do that bots cant, and why, and once we understand it we move on to the next thing, until we figure out everything.
Small nitpick: Modern physics wants to have a word with you.
But I think I know what you want to say.
Sometimes, a difference in quantity is a difference in quality :-) P=NP and all that.
It feels like you're talking past each other. Conanbatt says Go will never feel the same to humans, especially humans who see Go as the purpose, the "main course", of their life. Some fundamental psychological quality is lost.
You're saying that people enjoy doing even silly, "pointless" (sic!) things for a living, like playing sports. And that you can actually make great money doing that. Money and economy are human constructs, "for monkeys by monkeys", not a physical law.
I don't see any contradiction there.
The same was said about playing Go. I would be careful with such statements.
The only problem about art is that we don't have a good measure for it. And for all kind of measures you could think of, I bet that it's not that hard to train some computer to beat a human in that measure.
The definition only includes the making money part, not the reason. Many people do take money for what they do simply so they can do it full time.
I expect this to be the next big human activity where machines consistently beat humans within ten years.
We already have neural networks that can apply a painting style; creating a new style, and impacting a political or sentimental meaning to a painting, will soon be within grasp.
To quantify it, I offer a Turing-like test that I expect to be beat within ten years: there will be a machine-generated work of art that will be sold higher than human-made ones at an auction in which there are both human and machine works of art, but where nobody in the room knows which is which.
That's not strictly true. With enough samples, or fast enough playing bots, you can explore that domain automatically. There are many different approaches from expert systems which are purely human heuristics to minmax which can be defined purely in terms of in-game points difference.
Why the situation is advantageous may be just "because enough Monte Carlo simulations starting with it end up winning".
Sure, there is some sales skill there, but strong catan players dont need to discuss anything :)
Machines can be made to do better at just about any sport but we still have athletes because it's about human potential and competing within that regime, not pure unbounded scientific advancement. If that's what you want then there's plenty of opportunity to do so in academia rather than professional sports, and such pursuits coexist just fine.
I don't know whether mastering Chess or Go makes you a better thinker or not, but it certainly might, and many people think it does.
So if you become a better human thinker than you were before, who cares if a machine can still beat you at the game? It's for your own growth.
A machine is probably also better and sitting and thinking of nothing, but lots of people will still meditate.
Fundamentally, this is a question of human identity. If bots are better than us at everything, what is the purpose of anything? What would we do?