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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what would be the result if the rules of the game were tweaked slightly (in an arbitrary fashion) just before a game, then the match went ahead as before. My guess would be Ke Jie would be fine and would adapt fairly quickly and AlphaGo would look pretty bad.

I think the AI/human crossover boundaries are at meta boundaries. As we get more meta, humans do better over AI. AI has been eating up the lower meta levels for some time now. It has been a very long time since a human could do division faster than a computer.

The question is how far does this meta staircase ascend, and if/when will AI climb all the way to the top?

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It's not general AI, no one said it was. It's similarly not going to play checkers at the drop of a hat like KJ could.

The thought experiment a little more refined, like alphago programmers get time to implement only validMoves() and makeMove() then let the same learning process go on it, I wouldn't count it out. If you only flip the switch once the new game variant starts, before a human has even begun to take an action the computer will have played out thousands if not millions of games using MCTS and slowly training up its networks in real time instead of using a static one. As the game progresses the bot should only get better and better.

sounds like General Game Playing task. Well, MCTS alone is often used in that domain, and it wouldn't surprise me if Ke Jie was a weaker checkers player than just a brute MCTS, nevermind any attempts to use neural nets (if that would even make sense for checkers?)

What sorts of modifications could even be made to Go that it doesn't turn into an imbalanced mess?

You can make huge fundamental changes like "you cannot connect 3 stones in a row" or you cannot make a certain shape with your stones. There are 'bad' shapes in go that you learn when you're young that almost never surface in higher levels of play (of course you would make a non-bad shape illegal). You can say every 15 turns you get 2 moves in a row and they are stagged (this is game-breaking). You can ban certain josekis ('standard moves' early in the game). You can make each captured stone worth 2 points instead of 1.

Every move, you flip 6 coins. If all 6 come up as heads, you swap seats and colors with your opponent.

This means that an advantageous board position is much less important, and it will be in both players favour to keep the board position very near evenly matched.

Not always. A player that thinks he will lose a game that's tied in the last 8-ish moves will have an incentive to create a highly unbalanced game. That way, that player gets a 50% chance of winning.

Given that there's only one flip left and you need 6 heads, he has a 1/2^6 or 1/64 chance to win.

In go the last 8 moves is almost never going to make the difference (the last 20-40 moves in a game that doesn't end in resignation there are almost no mistakes in pro games).

Different versions of Go have different rules for scoring.

Switch to a 21x21 board? Maybe consider a different board shape? Suppose there is a hole somewhere.

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