Go AlphaGo, Go

Ban Gu, Beckett, and I

Born in China thousands of years ago, Go—also known as baduk or weiqi—is still the most complicated and demanding territorial strategy game in human history. 

The logic of the game is simple. Using either black or white stones, you want to create and protect as much space as you can on the board.

But there are 2.08168199382 x 10¹⁷⁰ legal positions to be played on a regular-sized Go board, making the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe, 10⁸⁰, seem easier to comprehend.

Weiqi Players China ca. 1644–1753

AlphaGo is a documentary about how an AI program learned to beat the top Go players of our time. 

We enter the story through Fan Hui, a professional Go player in France, who accepted an invitation from Google Deepmind to play against their AI AlphaGo in 2016.

My Go fixation kicked off about six weeks ago when I watched AlphaGo on YouTube. My partner had scored a Go board at the thrift store months ago, but I’d been reluctant to play it. 

The truth is, I don’t really like games. At least that’s what I’d been telling people about myself for longer than I can remember. I always preferred talking about life and art to playing war or real-estate games. I still do. 

Most people say Go is a war game too. But to many others, Go is about self-cultivation, religion, or my favorite interpretation, a game of cosmology.

The earliest mention of Go in Chinese records is in Shiben, from the 2nd century BCE.

Here’s an excerpt from “Yi zhi,” a prose poem by Ban Gu from the first century CE.

At its highest it contains the forms of heaven and earth; one step below, the proper governance of emperors and kings; in the middle, the power of the five hegemons, and at base, the affairs of warring realms. By surveying wins and losses, past and present are put into general order.

— From “Yi zhi” (The Essentials of Go), Ban Gu, translated by Luke Habberstad—I think.

I was with Ban Gu until the last sentence, but the phrase “general order” made me pause and Google.

According to dictionary.com, general order meant:

noun Military. Usually general orders 

1. any one of a set of permanent orders from a headquarters establishing policy for a command or announcing official acts.

2. any one of a set of permanent orders governing the duties and behavior of sentries on routine guard duty.

It made sense. Ban Gu was not only a poet but also a historian and politician. His twin brother was a military general. But I didn’t like it, so I kept Googling.

Here’s what Investopedia had to say:

What Is a General Order (GO)?

A general order (GO) is a status given to imported goods that are missing the proper documentation or cannot be quickly cleared through customs for other reasons. Merchandise may be held under general order if the proper duties, fees, or interest are not paid, if the owner fails to complete the required customs paperwork, or if it is not correctly or legally invoiced. 

I could work with this one. 

I pictured 180 stones for the past and 181 stones for the present in two boxes next to an empty Go board. In this image, putting time in a general order was a nonlinear arrangement, and there was nothing to stop me from creating a new general order toward the future over and again, as many times as I wanted.

Go was considered the holy grail of AI up until 2016. AI couldn’t even beat a medium-high-level human Go player because of the complexity of the game’s possibilities. So Hui was confident he’d win, and shocked when he lost 5-0. 

“I don’t understand myself anymore,” he said. And when Deepmind challenged world’s best Go player of the decade Lee Sedol to play against AlphaGo, Hui decided to help Deepmind improve the AI until the match. 

Hui’s switch from confidence to emptiness to surrender was painful to watch at first. It felt like he needed AlphaGo to defeat Lee Sedol so the world would see Hui didn’t lose because he was a weak player but because the AI, which he was now a part of, was simply unbeatable. 

Like God. Like death. Like time. 

Even AlphaGo struggled at the endgame more than any other part of the game.

Beckett’s Play Endgame is about four people in a room in the decline of an undefined period in history. None of the characters ever name or discuss the catastrophe outside or their part in it. 

Hamm is covered by an old sheet. Nagg and Nell, his parents, are in ashbins—just the way we put old people who don’t have anything left to contribute to their capitalist society, Adorno says in “Trying to Understand Endgame.” Clov, Hamm’s servant with whom he has a father-son-like relationship, is the only one who moves around their bounded space.

The leading AI developers warning the world of the dangers of AI remind me of Hamm. And Hui reminds me of Clov. Lee Sedol, I don’t know. Maybe he’s all four.

Sedol started studying Go from 9 am to 9 pm every day when he was 8 years old. 

“I want my style of Go to be something different, something new, my own thing, something that no one has thought of before,” he said to the cameras. He was sure he’d beat AlphaGo, but he lost all but one of the five matches.

AlphaGo the documentary ended on a high note, with Sedol saying the experience made him see Go in a new, exciting, and creative way.

Hui, the epilogue said, went on to win a European Go championship after training with AlphaGo.

But Lee Sedol announced his retirement from professional play in 2019 with an ominous statement: “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who was childishly enthusiastic about AlphaGo’s potential to extend the human mind in the documentary, now says, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Is this the endgame? I don’t know about Hassabis or Altman and their friends, but I don’t think it is for Lee Sedol. Looking back at his ambitious career, defeat, and decision to quit playing professionally has been cathartic even for me. 

Doing what you love professionally is a huge privilege, but it comes with the risk of losing all your autonomy with one wrong move.

Could Demis Hassabis imagine the risk his work would put humanity in as a teen European chess champion turned computer science student? Should he have stopped doing what he loved when he must have understood the dangers of his work? Should we, the little people, use AI to train and become better at what we do, pretend AI doesn’t have anything to do with our work, or just give up? 

I love the internet for letting me watch AlphaGo and ask all these questions that pushed me to learn and play Go almost every night since then and remember I don’t hate all games.

Go is teaching me how to engage with boundless dialogues on life, writing, literature at once, inspiring me to try new ways to construct and reconstruct narratives with more liberties, risks, and creative moves.

I hate the internet for all the reasons you do. I hate that it makes me feel like nothing I accomplish is good enough. I hate that whenever I go on the Substack app it shows me five news posts by writers with 5000+ subscribers talking about how they do it. I hate that I keep typing “gm” in my search bar and press enter at least once an hour even when I block all distracting websites to write.  

I talk many time that AlphaGo look like the real mirror. When you play with AlphaGo you feel very strange. You look like you’re all the time naked. The first time you see this, you don’t want to see because oh ‘This is me? The real me? And more then more you need accept, ‘Oh, this is the real me. So how? Now, how can I do?’

— Fan Hui, AlphaGo

I know that ChatGPT or any other human writer with access to the internet could make similar if not more sophisticated connections between everything that’s in this letter, but it doesn’t mean that I didn’t love doing it myself. I still hope that it will do something for you to know that it was me who wrote it—whatever I might mean to you. 

Just when I thought this piece was good to go, I read an interview with Sedol from 2013. Turns out, he was already planning to retire in three years back then. His plan was to come to the US to promote Go in the West.

Then, I lost two games in a row, and decided to listen to the Go proverb, “Beware of going back to patch up,” and leave the new connections to be made with Sedol’s intentions in 2013 for another game.

Do you play Go? Do you know anyone, especially a creator, who does? Do you have any Go or game & literature related reading/viewing recommendations for me? Will you please let me know if you do?

Naz