Beating humans in Go is, in itself, not all that exciting. Go bots have been beating strong humans for quite some time now (just not the very top humans).
There are other implications that make this AlphaGo progress super exciting though. Go captures strategic elements that go well beyond the microcosm of one nerdy board game.
That's the real reason Go has been around for >2,000 years, and why this AI progress is relevant, despite its limited "game domain".
I wrote about it here, from my perspective of an avid Go player & machine learning professional [1].
I disagree with this due to the rate of AlphaGo's progress. Consider CrazyStone which was the previous state of the art in Go computers. That program reached 5dan after many years of development and has not shown any signs of being able to reach Lee Sedol level (9dan).
In October of this year AlphaGo beat a 5dan player, bringing it into the range of CrazyStone. Only ~6 months later it beats a 9dan player which means it is now ~400 Elo higher. This means the new version would be predicted to beat the old version ~99% of the time.
Such incredible consistent progress of a problem considered somewhat intractable is notable and exciting. Imagine where this machine will be in 6 more months.
Yes, AlphaGo's progress is amazing. I don't think there's any disagreement there :)
But I don't think you know much about Go, if you can say Fan Hui is "just" 2 dan professional.
What do you reckon the strength difference is between 2p and 9p?
Nitpick: while AlphaGo today is certainly stronger than AlphaGo last October, it doesn't follow in any way from the fact that both programs beat their respective opponents. A > B, C > D, D > B, therefore C > A? By "400 ELO", no less?
Yes. This is the point. To what extent can AlphaGo transfer what it has learned in Go to other domains. It was a very smart move to train their first AI on Go!
There are other implications that make this AlphaGo progress super exciting though. Go captures strategic elements that go well beyond the microcosm of one nerdy board game.
That's the real reason Go has been around for >2,000 years, and why this AI progress is relevant, despite its limited "game domain".
I wrote about it here, from my perspective of an avid Go player & machine learning professional [1].
[1] http://rare-technologies.com/go_games_life/