The board game Go has more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the universe.

Because of that seemingly infinite complexity, developing software that could master Go has long been a goal of the AI community.

In 2016, researchers at Google’s DeepMind appeared to meet the challenge. Their Go-playing AI defeated one of the best Go players in the world, Lee Sedol.

After the match, Lee Sedol retired, saying that losing to an AI felt like his entire world was collapsing.

He wasn’t alone. For a lot of people, the game represented a turning point – the moment where humans had been overtaken by machines.

But Frank Lantz saw that game and was invigorated. Lantz is a game designer (his game “Hey Robot” is a recurring feature on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon), the director of the NYU game center, and the author of The Beauty of Games. He’s spent his career thinking about how technology is changing the nature of games – and what we can learn about ourselves when we sit down to play them.

Mentioned:

“AlphaGo”

“The Beauty of Games” by Frank Lantz

“Adversarial Policies Beat Superhuman Go AIs” by Tony Wang Et al.

“Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern

“Heads-up limit hold’em poker is solved” by Michael Bowling Et al.

Further Reading:

“How to Play a Game” by Frank Lantz

“The Afterlife of Go” by Frank Lantz

“How A.I. Conquered Poker” by Keith Romer

“In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future” by Cade Metz

Hey Robot by Frank Lantz

Universal Paperclips by Frank Lantz

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AI Has Mastered Chess, Poker and Go. So Why Do We Keep Playing?