The Human Move

A follow-up post to The Divine Move

78: Lee Seedol’s genius move in the fourth game.

The historic match between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo is over, and as you probably know it was a victory for the AI developed by Google’s DeepMind team. It was really exciting to watch, as it was full of surprises for everyone; the biggest being how strong a player AlphaGo turned out to be. It seemed unbeatable after the third game.

But in the fourth game, something amazing happened: Lee found a move that broke AlphaGo’s strategy and ultimately led him to his first win.

Gu Li, a top Chinese pro and a friend/rival of Lee Sedol, said this was a divine move, which is the highest praise a move can get. Interestingly, he said it immediately after the move was on the board, but AlphaGo didn’t notice its potential. For the next 9 moves, it was equally convinced that it would win the game. When it properly gauged the impact of White 78, it was already too late.

This got me thinking: if it takes a human to identify a move as a divine one, maybe it’s because it is first and foremost a human move.

In the press conference after the game, Lee said that he was grateful to all the people praising him for White 78, but that it really wasn’t that special: he just saw the move. This is the essence of human creativity. As Steve Jobs said, “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

Demmis Hassabis, DeepMind’s CEO, tweeted that AlphaGo assessed Lee’s move with a less than 1 in 10,000 chance of being played. It’s not that AlphaGo didn’t consider the move; it just dismissed it as highly improbable.

In a world dominated by probability and statistics, it’s very refreshing to see the human spirit ignoring the odds to come up with new solutions.

Long live the human move. Long live human creativity.