Japanese go was in decline because there were so many better career options for smart Japanese kids to pursue that the few remaining top-quality players couldn't get a meaningful number of top-quality practice games. The big surprise from AlphaGo beating humans is Japanese pros are suddenly able to win international tournaments again, apparently because the ~3 really good Japanese players can get an unlimited number of challenging games (and study sessions) with their computers.
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What implications this has for how AI might change the global economy is left as an exercise for the reader. The number of top-performing Japanese kids who realized they'd make way more money going to college and pursuing a normal white-collar career instead of playing go
Many people imagine that AI will primarily be a substitute for highly talented white-collar labor, and this will be a revolutionary benefit for developing countries currently bottlenecked by low average intelligence/drive, while being dangerous (or at least disruptive) for the
Something similar occurred in chess, so this makes sense as a possible conclusion.
wait, why wouldn't the same explanation predict that Korean/Chinese go would also be in decline?
Chess is interesting because it also made games better because people can try stuff and have confidence they don’t miss anything egregious if a chess engine can’t find a flaw.
I think in both chess and go, even though the AI sometimes has a very alien style humans don't try to imitate, what it mostly taught people is there are many stylistic things that are very similar winning % and mostly matters of taste
In the past they needed to be haunted by the 1000 year old ghost of a go master to get that caliber of practice
Okay this is a good thread.
This reads close to home.
In Vietnam, I did not know Data Science or AI were a career option before it were kinda late I had studied finished my uni already.
Even if I am decent at the starting of my career there is little opportunity to work in AI
Didn't basically the same thing happen with chess? The computer engines made it much easier to train and nowadays random kids are better than the grand masters before the nineties...
Gukesh talks about this. He thinks engine preparation denocearizes chess.
It has to do with economic strengths actually. Majority of top tier international go tournaments are hosted by Korean and Chinese companies nowadays.
wild how the missing ingredient wasn’t talent, but access to endless high‑level sparring partners
AI did not kill Go. It fixed the sparring problem and gave endless hard reps.
Which field jumps next when top practice goes from scarce to unlimited?
seriously? japanese go players suddenly winning because they can practice against AI now? these guys were already world-class before AlphaGo existed
chinese and korean players dominated for 15-20 years because their training systems were just more intense. japanese pros had the
plot twist: AI didn’t just beat the humans, it made the humans want to go outside.
Excuse the length but this was my prediction about this
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I think the service industry is doomed to die - that is to say, humans will no longer be the ones doing servicing like HVACs and plumbing, and even surgeries.
The main problem is that servicing is not scalable. The only way you can scale is if you spend more of your own time, or
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That's an interesting take, but I'd say a bigger factor than the increase of other opportunities was the simple decline in popularity and respectability of go in Japan. From being an arena of brilliant young minds, it became a bored old man's quaint way to stave off dementia.
My expectation is that when those top players retire, Japanese go is toast because the pipeline is gone. Many such cases.
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Learning go on the 1990s on, Japan was known to be very conservative. Their style least matches current AI styles
Gemini as a design partner has helped me come up with so many more good solutions. The AI knows a broad range of topics fairly well, and I bring judgement, intuition, and taste.
Statistically Japan may have been more insular. Before and through WW2 they were the best. China didn't allow much go til post cultural revolution I believe; I think Korea was slower for people to be free to spend the time on it. Even now nat'l service interrupts it.
You literally just said the reason it was in decline is Japanese are mostly bugmen lmao
Looked in Baumol cost. Don't think that's a real thing.
Can be easily explained by union, debt-financed white collar uncompetitive jobs.
Many countries are in decline because they distorted the market by artificially creating money to fund fake jobs, which raises opportunity