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Old 03-13-2016, 11:26 AM   #26
Talon87
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doppleganger View Post
So are Japanese players no longer the dominant force in their own game? The fate of the Go world is being determined by Google and Koreans?
It was never really "their own game," though. Go came to Japan through Korea, and to Korea from China. It's a Chinese game, and while the Japanese were the champions of Go from the late 19th through mid-20th centuries for sure, by the mid-20th their stranglehold on the top of the Go world had begun to loosen and the Chinese (today's No.2 overall) and Koreans (today's No.1 overall) made their ascent.

If anything, Japan's done really well for itself in recent years. When Hikaru no Go first came out, Japan was in a real slump. While the country had a number of Go pros whose names are well known (like Cho Chikun, Cho U, and Rin Kaiho), nobody could hold a candle to China's and Korea's best. Fast forward to a couple years later, and Iyama Yuuta is admitted to the hall of pros. Fast forward a couple years later still, and Iyama Yuuta already holds a number of titles. Fast forward a couple years more, only a few years ago from today, and Iyama Yuuta holds seven of the nine major Japanese tournament titles simultaneously, an unprecedented feat.

While Yuuta is good -- and a god domestically, a living Touya Akira and/or Meijin if ever there was one -- I never expected him to be good enough to hold his own against the foreign pros. Sure enough, when I went looking for his games on YouTube, I kept finding games where he made it to top cut in international tournaments but then fizzled out in the very first round of top cut when facing off against China's and Korea's best.

So you can imagine my pleasant surprise when I learned from this very thread that Yuuta is currently ranked No.3 in the entire world, only behind Ke Jie (current world No.1) and Park Jungwhan (never heard of him, I'll admit). That's awesome for Japan, to have a Go prodigy who can hold his own against literally the world's very best. No, he may not be No.1, but having the No.3 player worldwide is a mighty fine thing to have after the 1990s and 2000s for poor Japan. I mean, hell: he's technically ranked ahead of Lee Sedol, the very player we're watching perform in this AlphaGo tournament. That's how good Iyama Yuuta is.

Of course, one player alone can't be expected to carry an entire nation. But hopefully the presence of Yuuta on the battlefield will strengthen Japan's domestic Go game.
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Old 03-13-2016, 01:01 PM   #27
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>Go is a Chinese game

o_O

You've got to be kidding me.

I wa SHOCK!

Jijitsu de genjitsu ga ochite kuru!
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Old 03-13-2016, 10:53 PM   #28
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Some helpful Reddit links for reading about Game 4 and other games:
an r/MachineLearning thread on Game 4
an r/Baduk thread theorizing what it takes to beat AlphaGo
Move 78, the winning move
the board state shortly before AlphaGo forfeit (Lee is about to take the black stones on the far right, middle height)

Some choice quotes from Redditors:

Quote:
Lee 9-dan said everyone's support was the reason he won today and the Chinese word for support is 鼓励, which is pronounced gu li, so they had a good laugh on the QQ stream lol
Quote:
If anyone wants to know how big this is for Korea, 이세돌 (Lee Sedol in Korean) is trending #1 worldwide. 갓세돌 (God Sedol) is trending #7
Quote:
Now it is very likely that instead of being remembered for being the player who lost 0-5 to AI he will be remembered as the last human capable of beating it at all.
Quote:
I don't think anyone forsaw it that's why it's an inspired move but they all agreed that it was a game changing move afterwards. Gu Li 9-dan gasped when he saw it. lol
It's like Hikaru no Go come to life. That gasp! I wish I could have seen it.
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Old 03-13-2016, 11:50 PM   #29
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Watching today's Go match has recaptured my interest in playing. I was extremely into Go when I read Hikaru no Go about 12 years ago, but I never had anyone to play with, and I didn't fully comprehend the rules. Would love to buy a Go set and sit down with a friend and just play. I wouldn't know what the hell I'd be doing, but it has my attention again. The game was very interesting to watch.
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Old 03-14-2016, 01:39 AM   #30
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Dopple, what made you believe it was a Japanese game?

Confucious even mentions the game in his book like 1000+ years before it even reached Korea or Japan.
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Old 03-14-2016, 06:34 AM   #31
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Hikaru no Go made no reference to Go's Chinese origins, and only referenced that it was popular in Heian Japan, and I was never curious enough to do any external research on it. Unlike Akagi, Hikaru no Go never really motivated me to learn the game, so details like that were skipped.

Another part of the reason is on Anime News Network and AnimeSuki, users looked down on mahjong as a cheap, irreverent game with a short history, versus the distinguished history and tradition of Go in Japan. Since we're talking about forums that cater toward Japanophiles, it was easy to be mislead into assuming the game was Japanese when they don't even bother to mention China.
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Old 03-14-2016, 09:07 PM   #32
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I always wondered who the guy is on the left playing the moves for AlphaGo. I just assumed he was some random schlub that they grabbed from somewhere, but he's actually Aja Huang, the Taiwanese born lead programmer of AlphaGo. He's a Go player himself, but only reached 6 dan amateur level, so he obtained his PhD in computer science and got together with Demis Hassabis of DeepMind to create a Go playing computer. So Huang really is the equivalent of that guy in Hikaru no Go who quit insei school so he could develop Go AI. And why is AlphaGo represented by a British flag? DeepMind, the company that developed it is based in the UK, and they were recently bought by Google. I guess that in Google's infinite benevolence, they allowed DeepMind to retain their British sovereignty and didn't force them to plaster an American flag over AlphaGo.

Iyama Yuta: He is ranked #3 on goratings.com, but I should point out that those are not official rankings. There's no such thing as a universal Go world champion, nor is there a universal world ranking of Go players. Iyama Yuta's #3 ranking on that website is a controversial subject: as Talon pointed out, he absolutely dominates domestic Japanese tournaments, but does less well in international tournaments; sometimes he doesn't even bother showing up to them, despite being Japan's only hope of winning. Japanese Go fans reason that he concentrates on domestic Japanese tournaments because there's a lot of money in them, but critics interpret him as ducking strong Chinese and Korean opponents. They think that his elo is subsequently inflated by mainly playing weak Japanese opponents (like in that Seinfeld episode where Kramer boasts about being the strongest karate student in his dojo, then Elaine finds out that his class is full of little kids). He did win the Asian TV Cup in 2013, which was Japan's first international win in over a decade or something ridiculous like that.

What the strongest Go country is: This is also a subject of debate, it's very close between Korea and China. I give the edge to China right now, because they hold most of the major international titles (this is a little bit out of date. Doesn't include Ke Jie's recent dominance). You'd think that China could easily crush Korea with its larger talent pool, but Go is MUCH more popular in Korea than it is in China. According to statistics, the amount of people who actually play Go in China and Korea is virtually identical, despite China's far greater population, so it makes sense that they're neck and neck. Go is less popular in Japan relative to Korea; the problem with Hikaru no Go recruiting new players in Japan is that it was equally popular in Korea. I know that Cho Hyeyeon is a female Korean player who runs a popular English language Go blog, and she was inspired by the show. I think she was even a Hikaru x Touya yaoi fangirl lmao

Quote:
Originally Posted by deoxys View Post
Watching today's Go match has recaptured my interest in playing. I was extremely into Go when I read Hikaru no Go about 12 years ago, but I never had anyone to play with, and I didn't fully comprehend the rules. Would love to buy a Go set and sit down with a friend and just play. I wouldn't know what the hell I'd be doing, but it has my attention again. The game was very interesting to watch.
Want to play, bro? Is there a long dead Go club in the clubs forum that we can revive? We can be like The Resistance in Terminator, huddled in an underground bunker playing Go so that we can fight back against the machines.
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Old 03-14-2016, 09:15 PM   #33
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Want to play, bro? Is there a long dead Go club in the clubs forum that we can revive? We can be like The Resistance in Terminator, huddled in an underground bunker playing Go so that we can fight back against the machines.
Ouch, man. Every time I revive it no one shows up to play!

Here you go. Last post was almost exactly one year ago to the day.

I would soft rank myself as between 13 and 10 kyu, inclusive. What are you ranked?

EDIT: I forgot -- KGS's Java client is no longer compatible with Windows XP and it was never compatible with iOS to begin with. So I don't currently have a means by which to play you. (At least not on KGS.) Darn. :\
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Old 03-14-2016, 10:00 PM   #34
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This whole thing has got me interested in learning to play Go. I played my first game yesterday, actually, and naturally got slaughtered against a 23 kyu player. (onlinego.com or something along those lines starts you at 25 kyu). The game is a lot more complex than it appears on the surface. It's definitely something I'd like to pick up.
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Old 03-15-2016, 12:13 AM   #35
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Looks like I missed you by a good hour and a half. (See next paragraph.) It's too late at night to play a full game, but I would've liked to have shown you a few basics.

I tried out the site you mentioned -- and it worked! I set up a private room called "for phoopes," but while I was writing the above paragraph someone from Hong Kong let himself into the room and wanted to play me. I didn't want to be mean so we played a quick game. If the link still works, you can find the room here. I wouldn't say I was playing Teaching Go with him but I was periodically testing him. When I saw how he opened super basic, I quasi-mirrored it, happy to divide the board roughly cleanly between us and take it to mid-game and end-game fighting. When he tried to establish some moyo, I gave him a two-headed dragon (metaphorically speaking) to have to deal with and played in response to his response. Towards the end the game could've been pass-passed much sooner but I decided to deliberately leave some Ko threats on my end available for him to experiment with. (Some he did, some he didn't.) In the end I decided against any invasions, eager to see what the final score was.

... I did not expect it to be that close. One-half moku. O_o Against a beginner whose ranking was "19k[?]". I guess I gave up far too much territory in the early game after all and ought to have been more aggressive in the early and early-mid game. Oh well. Still won ... but yeesh. x_x
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Old 03-15-2016, 04:29 AM   #36
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Well...Lee said it was gonna be 4-1!
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Old 05-22-2017, 04:43 PM   #37
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https://qz.com/988488/the-final-batt...me-go-is-here/

Okay boyos, Ke Jie is set to play AlphaGo in a series starting tonight. This is it, this is truly the end of the line! Unlike Lee Sedol who was a historically dominant player but past his prime, Ke Jie is the current, undisputed #1, so if he loses here then we have to relinquish our human superiority forever.

And to think that just a few years ago I had boasted to chess-playing friends that my game was better because it was too complex for computers to beat even a strong human amateur player ...
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Old 05-23-2017, 04:40 AM   #38
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Ke Jie lost the first game by 0.5 points. AlphaGo has gotten even more powerful since playing Lee Sedol and there's little hope that Ke Jie can even win a single game.

But check out this sweet fanart!
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Old 08-20-2017, 07:34 PM   #39
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All right, one final note on the AlphaGo saga. Before they publicly revealed AlphaGo:

Quote:
Before AlphaGo, mechanical mastery of the game had been perceived to be years away . . . But the writing was on the wall in January when Ke and other top Chinese players were flattened by a mysterious competitor in online contests.

That opponent was revealed afterwards to be the latest version of AlphaGo, which was being given an online test run by its developer, London-based AI company DeepMind Technologies, which Google acquired in 2014.
I find this funny because a mysterious online opponent beating all the top players is exactly what Sai did in Hikaru no Go.

After Ke Jie got swept by AlphaGo, he achieved some kind of enlightenment and went on an incredible 22 game winning streak against human opponents. He said this during the streak:

Quote:
After my match against AlphaGo, I fundamentally reconsidered the game, and now I can see that this reflection has helped me greatly. I hope all Go players can contemplate AlphaGo's understanding of the game and style of thinking, all of which is deeply meaningful. Although I lost, I discovered that the possibilities of Go are immense and that the game has continued to progress. I hope that I too can continue to progress, that my golden era will perservere for a few more years, and that I will keep growing stronger.
There have been longer winning streaks in the past, but they were able to rack up a lot of easy wins against weak local opponents. A 22 game winning streak in the modern era is an amazing feat because Ke regularly has to play games against former world champions and top 20 ranked players in the world.

He even had hordes of fangirls flock to him for autographs during his winning streak. Apparently being a top Go player in Asia = being Tom Brady here.
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