Beginner's Mind: the Unexpected Move

Some three thousand years ago in China, the strategic board game Go was developed.... Besides being the oldest continually played board game in human history, it's also one of the most complex... Since the number of possible configurations on the board is larger than the number of atoms in the universe, it was believed computers didn't have the processing power needed to beat a skilled human player.

Scientists built an artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo. The program learned to play by teaching itself, studying more than 100,000 past games. It then played against itself over and over until it was ready to challenge the reigning grand master of the game. The famous game between Alpha Go and South Korean nine-dan grand master Lee Sedol occurred on March 10, 2016.

In move 37 of the second match, AlphaGo was faced with a decision that would determine the way the rest of the game would be played. There were two apparent choices to be made. Choice A was the kind of move that would signal the computer was playing a game of offense. Choice B would signal it was playing a defensive game.

Instead, the computer decided to make a third move, a move no one steeped in the game had ever made in thousands of years of play... The grand master playing against the machine was so taken aback, he stood up and walked out of the room. He eventually returned, not with his usual confident composure but visibly shaken and frustrated. After recovering from his shock and studying the unexpected move, Lee Sedol kept repeating "So beautiful. So beautiful." Alpha Go won the game, with that never before seen move turning the course of the game in favor of AlphaGo..

What was it that allowed a machine to devise a move no one steeped in the game had ever made in thousands of years of play? It wasn't necessarily its intelligence. It was the fact that the machine learned the game from scratch, with no coach, no human intervention, no lessons based on an expert's past experience. AlphaGo followed the fixed rules, not the millennia of accepted cultural norms attached to them... It wasn't held back by limiting beliefs... It was the first time Go had been played with the full spectrum of possibilities available. With a clean slate, AlphaGo was able to innovate, devise something completely new, and transform the game forever. If it had been taught to play by humans, it most likely wouldn't have won the tournament.

This is beginner's mind -- one of the most difficult states of being to dwell in for an artist, precisely because it involves letting go of what our experiences have taught us, including our knowledge of what is not possible. Beginner's mind is starting from a pure childlike place of not knowing...

-- Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023)

In choosing its unexpected move, AlphaGo made the extremely unusual decision to abandon a group of stones on the lower half of the board in order to make a play in an entirely different area. AlphaGo placed its black stone in a wide open area just beneath a single white stone played earlier by Lee Sedol.

By using neural networks, AlphaGo calculates a colossal number of likely and unlikely probabilities many moves into the future, far beyond what the human brain can assess during a Go game. More importantly, AlphaGo is significantly different from previous Artificial Intelligence efforts. It does not attempt to maximize its points or its margin of victory, but tries to maximize its probability of winning. If AlphaGo must choose between a scenario where it will win by 20 points with 80 percent probability and another scenario where it will win by one and a half points with 99 percent probability, it will choose the latter. -- Wikipedia

In other words, AlphaGo has no ego! It does not value a glorious high scoring win more than squeaking by with a very slight edge.

To see a free documentary about this game, see AlphaGo the Movie.

Three years after the AlphaGo match, Lee Sedol retired as a professional Go player. In a New York Times article (July 10, 2024), Lee Sedol explained that “Losing to A.I., in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing.” When considering artificial intelligence's grasp of Go, he said it was important to remember that humans both created the game and designed the A.I. system that mastered it. What he worries about is that A.I. may change what humans value.“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.” What he regarded as an art form, an extension of a player’s own personality and style, was now cast aside for an algorithm’s ruthless efficiency. “I could no longer enjoy the game.”

Several writers have described their personal grief at witnessing the crushing defeat of the human spirit signaled by the match of AlphaGo and Lee Sedol - click here to read more. In many ways, this match echoes the heartbreak of the folk hero John Henry, the railroad track steel driver who goes up against the invention of the steam powered rock drill in a race that he won only to die in victory with a hammer in hand as his heart gave out from the stress.