Not sure I share the astonishment of people here. Sure, I can see the significance for Go players. And sure, it's another bruise on the
amour propre of humanity. But an AI will win 5-0 at some point soon, possibly by the end of the week.
And as far as the AI community is concerned, that box will have been ticked. That's all. Defeating the world's best Go player will change nothing in the AI community, even as it gives us some further reason to ponder our limitations. Indeed, beating the world's greatest chess player twenty years back led exactly nowhere. Quite simply, by the late 1980s, the AI community had already realised that, in search of Artificial
Intelligence, chess had little to offer. Don't believe me? It's here, in a stupendously informative book by
Nick Bostrom (pp. 7-8)
Bostrom's point is that activities like Chess or Go are trivially easy for AI entities, just as they are enormously complex for us. The reason? The nature of information processing: the human brain has evolved to be astonishingly effective and efficient at
parallel processing, but with limited capacity for
serial processing (as required by chess and Go). By contrast, AIs have evolved profound competence with the latter, but continue to perform poorly at the former. The task of the AI community these days is to improve parallel processing capacity - technically, hard. (There is an additional issue of speed in processing [slow nerve conductivity v. hyperfast AIs] which I'll put aside for the moment).
In exploring the emergence of
superintelligent entities, Bostrom takes the discussion far beyond the trivialities of chess- or Go-playing AIs. He asks how we are going to manage/control AIs hugely more intelligent than humans - measured by whatever properties we assign to 'intelligence'. If the outer limit of human IQ is 200, what is to be expected of an AI with an IQ of 20,000? (!!). Rendered in chess metrics, since the best chess AI currently has an Elo of 3200, what would chess look like if played by an AI of Elo 30,000 (never mind 300,000)? Obviously such an AI would find better things to do with its time than waste it on chess or Go.
And that's why, despite all the hoopla about chess and Go going down to AIs, it really isn't that big a deal. But it will be a very big deal indeed the day an AI performs tasks as complex as those our brain performs the minute we open our eyes each morning, tasks a million times more complex than any game of chess. Or Go.
(And more, of course.)