I'm not a Go player but play other competitive sports. Humans have a herd mentality...as Op mentioned there's certain styles of playing...which has their own strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes people will not examine other styles that may have better strengths and just focus on the exist one. Then comes along someone who 'thinks outside the box' with a new style and revolutionize the playing field.
Think Bruce Lee and the creation of Jeet Kune Do. Before him everyone concentrated on improving one style by following it classically, rather than just thinking of 'how do I defeat someone'.
IMHO Lee is the best at the current style of Go. AlphaGO is the best at playing Go. Maybe humans can devise a better style and defeat AlphaGo, but I'm sure AlphaGo can adapt easily if another style exists.
Swimming. It used to be that swimmers were supposed to be streamlined and avoid bulky muscles. Then a weightlifter decided he wanted to swim. Swimmers today all lift weights.
Programming. It used to be that people built programs in a very top down, heavily planned way. Think waterfall. We now understand that a highly iterative process is more appropriate in most areas of programming.
Expert systems. It used to be that we would develop expert systems (machine translation, competitive games, etc) through building large sets of explicit rules based on what human experts thought would work. Today we start with simple systems, large data sets, and use a variety of machine learning algorithms to let the program figure out its own rules. (One of the giant turning points there was when Google Translate completely demolished all existing translation software.)
Serve-and-volley is pretty much non-existent in modern professional singles tennis. We were always taught to attack the net, and every action was basically laying the groundwork to move forwards and attack.
Nowadays, top players slug it out baseline-to-baseline.
In terms of stance, we were taught to hit from a rotated position where your shoulder faces the net, and a normal vector from your chest points to either the left or right side of the court.
Nowadays, it's much more common to hit from an "open" position, where your body is facing the net, not turned. This would have been considered "unprepared" or poor footwork in my day, but it actually allows for greater reach. It does make it more difficult to hit a hard shot, but that's made up for by racquet technology and generally stronger players.
If you're in the mood for some long form literary tennis journalism about this subject, check out David Foster Wallace's Federer as Religious Experience from 2006.
> AlphaGO is the best at playing Go. Maybe humans can devise a better style and defeat AlphaGo, but I'm sure AlphaGo can adapt easily if another style exists.
Which is a curious point. The gripes about early brute force search algorithms (e.g. Deep Blue?) were that they felt unnature.
However, as the searches get more nuanced and finely grained, is there a point at which a fast machine begins doing fast stupid machine things quickly enough to feel smart?
Are there any chess / Go analogs of the Turing test? Or is a computer players always still recognizable at a high level?
It has been said that a game of Go is a conversation with moves in different areas showing disagreement. The game is also known as 'shou tan' (hand talk). From the commentary, AlphaGO is currently passing the Go Turing Test in almost all cases. There are some moves which some say are uncharacteristic, then later play out well. Or so called mistakes not affecting the outcome of the match. One explanation given was that AlphaGo optimizes for a win, not win by greatest margin, which is a/most valid for human or machine.
Computer players will be recognizable as long as they are designed to win, and not to play the way a human plays.
A Turing test for game players is an interesting idea, it would be useful for designing game players that are good sparring partners rather than brutes that can whipe the floor with you.
Bruce Lee played it very smart and attained a guru status in the West, but there's no evidence he was a world-class fighter, only unsubstantiated claims by his entourage.
As for JKD, people are drawn in by its oriental esotericism, but there's no evidence it is an especially effective fighting style, or that it has something that (kick)boxing does not.
Think Bruce Lee and the creation of Jeet Kune Do. Before him everyone concentrated on improving one style by following it classically, rather than just thinking of 'how do I defeat someone'.
IMHO Lee is the best at the current style of Go. AlphaGO is the best at playing Go. Maybe humans can devise a better style and defeat AlphaGo, but I'm sure AlphaGo can adapt easily if another style exists.