Lee Sedol Retired

In late 2019, Lee Sedol, well known for playing the AlphaGo, announced his retirement from playing Go professionally. The reason being that AI had become so good at playing Go and that even if he became the best player in the world, there is still “an entity that cannot be defeated”.

As a human, it is hard not to feel for Lee Sedol. This was a game that he dedicated his life to, and it is one in which he will never be able to beat AI. It is clear that this fact has taken a toll on him, and while he is still one of the top Go players in the world, he decided to retire. It is unfortunate that the cause of his retirement was knowing that he would never be able to beat a computer at a game he has dedicated his life to.

Before the series, the expectation going into the match was that Lee Sedol would win 4 or 5 games in the 5 game series. This changed once spectators realized how skilled the AlphaGo really was. The funny thing is that against an artificial intelligence agent, with sufficient training, it makes no sense that Lee Sedol would have an advantage against AlphaGo. While we have the benefit of hindsight and are more knowledgeable about AI now. It seems that comparing Lee Sedol and AlphaGo is like comparing apples to oranges. Humans and machines are so fundamentally different, and have different strengths that comparing them at the same task and deriving their intrinsic value based on their performance is almost ridiculous. Humans will never have the computational ability that machines do and they will never be free from the psychological influences impacting their decision making. Just like machines will never be able to articulate emotions or utilize intuition based on circumstance. It reminds me of the Einstein quote “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

It is incredible what AlphaGo and AI are capable of doing, and it is also really unfortunate that it has convinced one of the top Go players in the world to stop competing. The whole situation is similar to Kasparov vs Deep Blue. After reflecting on it, Kasparov came to the conclusion that humans and machines will perform best when working together. Allow both to play to their strengths and see what happens.