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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

The other possibility is that it destroyed the incidental dogma that tends to build up in these types of games and human activities. This is why I like the "hacker ethos" as much as I do, it tends to eschew things like "accepted" dogma in order to find additional performance that other people were just leaving on the table out of polite comfort.

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The dogma generally becomes accepted because it outperforms other known strategies. In a game like Go, that could previously take a while because there are so many possible follow-ups that it takes time to accumulate enough data on whether a new strategy is actually decisively better, or just worse but over-performing because it's less known.

There's a big difference between those two and "the hacker ethos" will lead to a lot of the latter. However, now computers can simulate enough games to give a relatively high degree of confidence that a variation in strategy is truly better.

I don't know how it's developed since, but from what I remember that was how it started - the AIs weren't following the standard moves (joseki) that we'd built up over centuries and human players were thrown off by the nonstandard responses that were working better than expected.

I wonder if AI could be built to continually adapt, so that instead of playing an optimal strategy, it instead chooses between various suboptimal strategies. If humans train to play against the optimal strategy, then maybe the AI could do better by playing in suboptimally but less expected ways.

This is already happening. The point differences for sometimes huge deviations are minuscule, so it's worthwhile to have in one's repertoire. The same is mostly true for purely human games, too: These are trick moves.

So the progress of human proficiency in Go and our collective advancement over time is hindered by dogmatic rules introduced over time. These rules predispose players toward specific strategies and consequently limit the scope of our creative potential within the game. In contrast, AI algorithms operate without such biases offer a unique advantage in overcoming these limitations. They essentially inspire us to get out of established patterns (or local minima) of play and broaden the range of our strategic moves.

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