I finally wrote a new column for PopMatters.
I stayed up all night several days in a row to watch the AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol match play out. It was being held during the day in Korea so that meant it started around midnight here on the East Coast. I feel it was worth it.
I really like the game of Go and try to talk about it when I can, but unless you are ingrained in the game, a lot of the specifics are utterly meaningless. I suppose that’s a lesson that could be applied to most games. Except, I feel if I were to describe a play in Chess or Checkers or Poker, most could get what I mean and not just the emotional resonance of the scene given how widespread knowledge of these games are. Go doesn’t share that privilege in the west. Nor does it give rise to easy explanation anyway given the size of the board and the complexity of influence the stones give off in their shapes.
This post was an exercise in writing about the recent match. Really, I wrote it without any idea of what it was about. There was a lot of details and trivia that did end up getting cut out of later drafts as well as a simplified rewrite of the two play-by-plays that made it in. I had to forego the technical excellence and awe of the situations and reduce it down to the meaning behind the plays. Actually, neither are the plays that get brought up by the experts when it comes to AlphaGo’s play, instead it’s move 37 in game 2. The move itself looks fairly innocuous. It something I might play. But then I’m not at that level where it would be an issue. Instead, I stuck with two more obvious and more easily explained plays.
Thankfully, a point did eventually emerge in the piece. We are so proud of our games and our ability to master them. We think of them as engaging with pure thought. So, when something comes along that cannot think and beats our best, we think it can think. Gary Kasparov thought he detected a “deep intelligence” in Deep Blue when he played it. Likewise, the commentators thought AlphaGo was thinking up new ways of playing against Lee Sedol. But they aren’t. It’s an interesting situation that reveals our biases towards games and how such a different thing playing is to thinking.
You can read my full description over at PopMatters.