Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

It’s worth understanding that Shin Jinseo is significantly stronger than his nearest human opponents now, than Magnus was even at his peak.

In go ELO like scoring he’s something like 120 points over the next strongest player. No other player has ever broken a 3800 rating let alone 3850. Ke Jie (the previous long time champion) peaked at 3755. Shin Jinseo’s strength graph is the most absurd straight line.

https://www.goratings.org/en/

2 stones is historically the gap between a 9P ranked and a 1P ranked professional player (very roughly the gap between the top super grand master and an almost grandmaster)

That is to say it’s shocking that Katago (almost certainly significantly stronger than AlphaGo) is a mere 2 stones stronger than Shin Jinseo. I suspect it would be 3-4 stones vs any other human pro.

In Go, there are exchanges of plays called "joseki". Professionals consider the outcome of joseki to be an equal result for both players. Most joseki are only a handful of moves, but some, such as the "flying knife" joseki have variations that continue for upwards of 50 moves. A traditional 19x19 go board has 361 intersections.

Shin's genius was to play out a complex variation of the flying knife joseki that was, in essence, a one-way path to reach an equal board position that occupied about 1/4 of the board. Due to the 2-stone handicap, the position favoured black with the game ~25% complete. KataGo could not have played any other way, where a human may have tried to foil the plan by introducing further complications.

What was truly incredible was how Shin held the advantage from that point on.

> "This series taught me that rather than trying to imitate AI, it is far more important to build the board according to my own style."

It's never made sense to me that so many go players study AI go play in the hope of emulating it in a human game. We're not machines. We can't do thousands of Monte Carlo tree searches per second.

Apparently 2 stones is a huge advantage. An estimate is that the computer is roughly 4-600 ELO stronger on an even match.

Also, the human played a strategy tailored to that huge initial advantage. He said that the AI did not handle this particularly well, and played high probability moves instead of trying to lure him into a mistake.

Also, even though this was the best Go engine, it was not running on a supercomputer, and had a relatively limited amount of time per move.

So, this was an important victory for a human, but not a sign that humans are now stronger than AIs at Go.

For those who don’t follow human vs AI Go (I don’t), this is with a 2 stone handicap in favor of the human which is apparently standard.

What I found interesting was that he adapted and shifted to a very unconventional strategy of play, opposed to the AI who primarily seems to play high probability moves. Does this not demonstrate the human edge against AI in novel / unconventional thinking?

Is there an equivalent of LeelaKnightOdds for Go? That might be harder to tackle.

The fact that it's news that a human beat an AI, post-AlphaGo, demonstrates the current norm.

KataGo isn't very good at exploiting weaker opponents. In chess people were convinced a grandmaster can never be beaten with a knight odds. It's just too easy to simplify the position and win. It was very easy (for a grandmaster) vs already super human Stockfish. It was still kinda easy (for a strong GM) vs 200+ ELO stronger NNUE Stockfish. And then someone made a net optimized for exploiting humans. Its games are amazing and it beats GMs with knight odds with ease. It's unreal how good it is at setting traps, playing lines that don't work in theory but the refutation is based on precise tactical sequence a few moves deep. Playing vs it feels like playing vs a spider that slowly weaves a net around you till you can't move anymore.

I predict the same thing is going to happen in Go once the engines catch up.

(You can play those chess bots on Lichess for free. Challenge LeelaQueenOdds or LeelaRookOdds if you are master level or stronger)

I'm struggling to believe it's not good enough to beat a mere mortal.

For all four of you that are like me and understand Dota 2 a lot better than Go, and are wondering what impact a “two-stone handicap” has and what it means, ChatGPT Pro claims that to analogize this scenario to a professional team playing against OpenAI Five:

> The professional human team begins from a legal eight-to-ten-minute game state in which it has decisively won the laning stage: roughly a 6,000–8,000 team-net-worth lead, a 4,000–6,000 team-XP lead, two enemy Tier 1 towers destroyed, the third badly damaged, and all three friendly Tier 1 towers standing.

We're so back