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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

> Shin et al calculate about 40 percent of the improvement came from moves that could have been memorized by studying the AI. But moves that deviated from what the AI would do also improved, and these “human moves” accounted for 60 percent of the improvement.

I don't often play Go myself but a number of my friends do. Among non-professional players, it is really common to see game play being not as exciting as before because there's now an easy way: just memorize and copy what the AI does. I don't doubt that professional players still have a ton of creativity, but a lot of non-pros don't really have too much creativity and the whole game becomes memorizing and replicating AI moves.

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> Among non-professional players, it is really common to see game play being not as exciting as before because there's now an easy way: just memorize and copy what the AI does

This is just… not true.

Unless one is playing at high dan ranks, it’s trivially easy to induce a “memorized sequence” that your opponent either will not have memorized or will leave them with a situation that they don’t understand well enough to capitalize on.

The “slack moves” in the openings that pros talk about are often worth 1.5 points or less (often a fraction of a point), and that assumes pro-level follow up.

This pro-level follow up is laughably rare outside of strong amateur dan levels and pro levels (and even within those ranks there are substantial differences).

Before that, weak amateurs were just replicating human joseki. That's nothing new. They definitely give a player a good start, but knowing which to use and when, and of course how to follow up until the game is over is no simple task. It also happens to be the case that AlphaGo, KataGo etc. prefer simplifying the board state. Remove complexity and win only by a thin margin, because that's all that's needed. Memorizing AI preferences is much easier than some of these highly complicated joseki.

> a lot of non-pros don't really have too much creativity and the whole game becomes memorizing and replicating AI moves.

That makes no sense. After 10-20 moves you are surely in a position that has never been played before. How do you memorize moves after that?

Perhaps sub-positions still repeat with some regularity? Meaning subsets of the board. I have never played Go however, I've only seen the board and read the rules.

Absolutely so. There are corner patterns but also side patterns and other patterns; all of them are 'joseki', known and often played sequences.

These can be memorized. But that's almost useless without understanding why these patterns are good. You still need to pick a pattern that works well with the rest of the board, in particular which conditions elsewhere on the board influence it (ladders, ko) and you need to know all the punishments for deviations. That's really difficult and often subtle, and it is where strong players as well as AI easily outplay someone who just mindlessly memorized patterns.

You'd be surprised. Joseki are corner shapes, which might interact with other corners in the medium to long run, but whose interactions are way too difficult for any human to understand well. Therefore, you have 4 corners, and it's quite likely that you'll see 4 joseki getting played in any game. Joseki sequences have been studied for a long time, so they can be relatively long: Say, 15+ moves of an avalanche joseki, memorized by both players, and that's just one corner. So even before computers were any good, you could still see pretty iffy players using memorized patterns in every corner for a total way past 20 moves.

If they are iffy players they'll use 4 memorised sequences then enter the mid-game with a losing position. Playing out memorised sequences without considering the interactions the corners have on each other is one of the weights keeping amateurs from moving up to higher ranks.

If you are playing someone who is worse at fighting then playing good-enough joseki and making up any theoretical difference in the middle game is a fine strategy. But even choosing good-enough joseki requires thought (or instinct) that does beyond what can reasonably be called memorising. It is critical to recognise when a framework is getting too big and invade before the opportune moment passes.

As thomasahle notes, pretty much every game is unique and a memorised sequence unbacked by an algorithm cannot hope to be optimal.

The accepted approach used to be that the direction of play mattered. Now the AI has told us that no, just get locally-even results in all corners and you're fine. I never would've guessed!

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