I don't know what the fascination with these AI versus human tournaments is. I'm old enough to remember the whole "Deep Blue" vs Kasparov exhibition, and I didn't really understand the fascination with all that either. That humans can make sufficiently strong calculators has never been a dispute in my mind. If the human wins over the calculator, good, but if the calculator wins, okay. What does that tell us exactly? The human had a bad day? The machine had a good one?
> That humans can make sufficiently strong calculators has never been a dispute in my mind.
Within our lifetimes (unless you're quite young) it was doubtful if a go ai would ever beat a decent human. Same was true for chess a generation or two earlier. It's news because it's the handoff of man to machine being the best at a particular thing.
This current news is news from the other way, this human did _exceptionally_ well.
>It's news because it's the handoff of man to machine being the best at a particular thing.
That's a way to see it. Another way to see it is that for any given event in a zero sum game, one of two outcomes, where two players are involved, will occur. Man only had to beat machines for what, 200-400 years only for it to beat man how many times for it to be "best"?
It's all narrative. Abstract strategy games with perfect information (like chess and go) look at a casual glance like they should be difficult for computers, but in fact they're rather ideal. Before AlphaGo, belligerent go players used to smugly dismiss chess as a 'solved game' (not what that means) because chess engines have been better than the best humans for years.
