One thing that isn't made clear in this writeup is that Master plays in a very nonhuman style, as opposed to the version of AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol, which mostly played like a strong human except for a few surprising moves. My first guess when I saw Master's games was that it was a program like AlphaGo that had its policy network trained from scratch rather than being bootstrapped by being given the goal of imitating the moves of strong humans. I'm eager to find out whether that was the case or whether it just moved away from human-like play during a very long self-play phase.
It really is a bit scary to see. I would not have guessed that human strategy was that deficient. Computer chess programs still tend to play with human-like strategy (partially because humans have coded their evaluation functions!) but godlike tactics. Master is not really playing like a human at all.
It really is a bit scary to see. I would not have guessed that human strategy was that deficient. Computer chess programs still tend to play with human-like strategy (partially because humans have coded their evaluation functions!) but godlike tactics. Master is not really playing like a human at all.