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voxic11yesterday at 1:06 PM1 replyview on HN

Yes but it was so shocking because it was such an inhuman, "unaesthetic" play. It was considered to be "creative" in that no human would have thought of making the move, so it can't simply be copying human play.


Replies

jebarkeryesterday at 3:08 PM

Indeed. To get "aesthetic" play you would have to mimic real human play for an interesting reason: the space of possible Go configurations and games is so mind-bogglingly vast that all of human history has only ever seen a infinitesimal sample. So any sense of aesthetics is just a consequence of chance and memetics. AlphaZero is effectively exploring a new branch of Go history so its aesthetics are completely different. Although maybe that just shows that the idea of aesthetics here isn't very meaningful.