Comment by keypusher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keypusher | Hacker News Reader

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The crucial play here seems to have been Lee Seedol's "tesuji" at White 78. From what I understand this phrase in Go means something like "clever play" but is something like sneaking up on your opponent with something that they did not see coming. Deepmind CEO confirmed that the machine actually missed the implications of this move as the calculated win percentage did not shift until later. https://twitter.com/demishassabis/status/708928006400581632

Another interesting thing I noticed while catching endgame is that AlphaGo actually used up almost all of its time. In professional Go, once each player uses their original (2 hour?) time block, they have 1 minute left for each move. Lee Sedol had gone into "overtime" in some of the earlier games, and here as well, but previously AlphaGo still had time left from its original 2 hours. In this game, it came down quite close to using overtime before resigning, which is does when the calculated win percentage falls below a certain percentage.

To underscore hyperpape:

Tesuji isn't a trick play, it's more like a power play. Each player can read out how a fight is going and see their line far into the future. Two professionals will pick two lines, two suji, which are in balance and push up against one another tightly.

A tesuji is a part of the line which is suddenly showy or strong. It could mean a failure for the opponent if they had not taken enough of an advantage in the struggle to this point or if they do not have a counter tesuji available.

Indeed, that might be the design of a set line: one side continually loses ground to the other forcing the other to take these small advantages all so that the first side has an opportunity to play a tesuji and return to balance. Many such lines are canonicalized ("joseki") and known to any professional. Moreover, professionals regularly identify potential tesuji and expect their opponents to as well.

Tesuji has no implication that your opponent won't anticipate it. Both sides can know that the tesuji is there, and it's still a tesuji.

AlphaGo was in over time in game 2.

To add to this, it seemed to have no problem makkng moves wothin the 60 second window (at that lte tage of the game).

I suspect that in almost all cases it has already converged on a move well before sixty seconds, and so if forced by time pressure to choose a move before it has achieved the confidence it's looking for, it will probably still do the right thing most of the time (especially in the endgame, when the branching factor is cut down enormously). It just uses additional time because it has it. I would love to see a graph of AlphaGo's thinking showing certainty of time, and how long it was taking to come up with the move it ultimately ended up playing, and how that certainty evolved over its thinking period.

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