I’ve been watching a lot of news during the lockdown. Of outrage followed by protest followed by outrage. Of statues toppled, erected and toppled. Of politicians one upping each other for electoral gain. But after a few rounds of grim ‘tit for tat,’ one side or the other would do something that I just did not see coming.
Maybe it’s the stress of watching it all, but I’m reminded of how my brother and I would start a game of Go, when we first learned it.
I thought I was familiar with the general rules of how politics is ‘played,’ but after being shocked and surprised too many times, I realised I have no clue what will happen next. I guess there are no clear rules to any of these games Or maybe the diversity of players with different styles and agendas makes prediction impossible.
Take Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players of all time. In 2016, the 33-year old Lee agreed to a play five, time-limited games of Go for a $1million prize. His opponent was Google’s artificial intelligence DeepMind.
The tournament was live-streamed globally, and having done his research on DeepMind’s previous games, Lee was confident he would win at least 4 of the 5 games.
In their first game, each player worked steadily and hard through their gameplay. Around 90 minutes in, Lee had to stop and think for five minutes or so before resuming at his usual pace. 30 minutes later, in the 102nd move of the game DeepMind made Lee exclaim out loud. He sat and considered the board in silence… for 10 minutes. The TV commentators were transfixed, and one observing grandmaster described Lee as ‘stunned.’ Lee eventually responded and the game went on. But things had changed, and in the end DeepMind won. In the post-game interview, Lee said the 102nd move was “a move that a human never would have played.”
Their second game was equally stunning. According to DeepMind’s programmers, after 36th moves DeepMind had an 80% chance of winning by about twenty points. But DeepMind did something that commentators said was “overturned hundreds of years of received wisdom.” It made a move that its programmers predictedd would extend the game’s duration and reduce its margin of victory, but increase its chance of winning to 99%. No professional human player of Go has every attempted such an ambitious ‘play it safe’ strategy. With that move, DeepMind of course went on to win the game. And the third game as well.
Coming into the fourth game, Lee had already lost the tournament. Maybe this freed him up in some way, because in the 78th move of the game, Lee play what Korean commentators call a ‘divine move’: it combines tactics, strategy, and a reversal of fortune in a move that a professional Go player might play only once in their life. For its brilliance, Lee’s ‘divine move’ is apparently on a par with a one played in 1846 by the Japanese Go master Hon’inbō Shūsaku.
Even without this historical awareness, DeepMind’s programmers knew something uncanny had happened. The software had judged the probability of a human making this particular move at ‘one in ten thousands,’ yet Lee played it. But then something even stranger occured. DeepMind’s subsequent ten moves were described by its programmes as ‘sub-optimal’ and reduced its probability of winning from 70% to below 50%. It looked to me like DeepMind’s software got rattled.
In his post-tournament interview, Lee said he had learned something new from his 4-1 loss: “I enjoyed playing DeepMind without question. And as I watched how he fought, I began to question the established conventions about how you should play.”
What was going through Lee’s mind during that ten minute silence in his first game, and in the fourth game when he made his divine move? I suspect he himself doesn’t know. And what was going through DeepMind’s circuitry in the second game when it upended centuries of human understanding, and in the fourth when it lost its way after Lee’s inspiration? I suspect its programmers themselves don’t know.
I guess all great human games see brilliant new players from time to time. They play in the same arena as their opponents, and in a superficially familiar style. But they are in a league of their own, playing a different stort of game, tuneded into music even they can barely hear. And they change the game forever.
When I see the news of political grandmasters playing off against each other, I can only look on in wonderment and not a little fear, trying to divine the games they are all playing at.
Image: Created using skillgamesboard.com.
Postcolonial boy 