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Comment by radford-neal | Hacker News Reader

The commenters here saying "humans cannot win anymore", "there is no chance that humans can beat the best Go AI anymore" are apparently unaware that this is no longer true.

See https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00241 and https://goattack.far.ai/

The best Go programs have a flaw that allows a good, but not championship-level, human to defeat them, by creating a group that encircles another group, which apparently confuses the AI's method of counting "liberties", which determine whether the group lives or not.

Some appear to dismiss this as just a "trick", but it seems to me to point to a more fundamental deficiency in the architecture or training method.

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Afaik this is already mitigated in the newest KataGo networks, and Chinese engines are much stronger and plausibly don't have this issue. Also, if I remember correctly, that attack only works on KataGo because the weights are public, so it would not work against the strongest closed-source engines.

They achieved a <10% win rate against other engines https://goattack.far.ai/transfer#contents, so the strategy is not that generic. Edit: actually it was 66% against another bot, https://goattack.far.ai/human-evaluation#human_vs_lz4096 but they had to bring the visits down to 4096, which I assume means that at a "normal" visit count the bot would still win.

Still, that paper is extremely interesting, consistently triggering suicidal behaviour in a super-human bot.

Although technically correct (the best kind), that is a weak point. In a more formal sense, "playing" a 2 player game means something like approximating the move in a game between 2 min-maxing oracles. Humans can't do that anywhere near as well as KataGo.

A human can, technically, beat a superhuman Go AI. But the process is clearly playing the opponent rather than the game, the moves are obvious weak moves. Humans aren't winning by playing good moves, the challenge being posed to the AIs isn't intimidating at all and they will defend against it sooner or later.

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