Article - AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think

[smatovic]

AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/0 ... ers-think/

..with some words by retired Lee Sedol.

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Srdja

[chetday]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing the link, which led me to a different article, this one from back in March of last year on chess and Alpha Zero: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2406675122

[towforce]

AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/0 ... ers-think/

Kudos to the author, Michelle Kim: the article is a treasure trove of wisdom!

“Go has become a mind sport,” says Lee Sedol, who retired three years after his 2016 defeat to AlphaGo. “Before AI, we sought something greater. I learned Go as an art,” he says. “But if you copy your moves from an answer key, that’s no longer art.”
...

Even top players like Kim and Shin don’t understand all of AI’s moves. “It seems like it’s thinking in a higher dimension,” she says. When she tries to learn from AI, she adds, “it’s less about rationally thinking through each move, but more about developing a gut feeling—an intuition.”
...

In 2024, researchers at Google DeepMind extracted new chess concepts from AlphaZero, a generalized version of AlphaGo Zero that can also play chess, and taught them to chess grandmasters using chess puzzles.
...

“Top-tier players haven’t yet been able to deduce the general principles behind AI moves,” says Nam Chi-hyung, a Go professor at Myongji University. [Graham's interjection: today's NNs are finding a large number of surface level patterns rather than the deep underlying ones]
...

Even if AI is an opaque teacher, it’s a democratic one. It has supercharged training for female Go players, who have long been underdogs of the game... ...More broadly, AI has narrowed the gap between players by helping everyone perfect their opening moves.
...

Analyzing male players’ ["experts"] moves with AI has shattered their veneer of infallibility... ..."Now, I know that they make mistakes, and their moves aren’t always brilliant"
...

“I may be one of the strongest human players, but with AI around, I can’t be so arrogant,” he says. “AI gives me a reason to keep improving.”

[ernest]

AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/0 ... ers-think/

..with some words by retired Lee Sedol.

--
Srdja

The link asks for subscription to be read...

[smatovic]

AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/0 ... ers-think/

..with some words by retired Lee Sedol.

--
Srdja

The link asks for subscription to be read...

Here, from Germany with Firefox, subscription boxes pop up but I can X them away, maybe try in browser reader-mode with Ctrl+Alt+R.

--
Srdja

[Eelco de Groot]

Same here, can click them away, it is a free first story. Usually last resort is reading the http source, but please keep it secret. Restarting the computer maybe works. Or just coming back later.

Here is the translated page for Ernest if he can read Dutch maybe this is not blocked right now: https://www-technologyreview-com.transl ... tr_pto=sdn

[ernest]

Same here, can click them away, it is a free first story. Usually last resort is reading the http source, but please keep it secret. Restarting the computer maybe works. Or just coming back later.

Here is the translated page for Ernest if he can read Dutch maybe this is not blocked right now: https://www-technologyreview-com.transl ... tr_pto=sdn

Thanks Eelco !!!
I succeeded with your translation link, using the same Google Translate, but --> Engels (English)

[Uri Blass]

AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/0 ... ers-think/

Kudos to the author, Michelle Kim: the article is a treasure trove of wisdom!

“Go has become a mind sport,” says Lee Sedol, who retired three years after his 2016 defeat to AlphaGo. “Before AI, we sought something greater. I learned Go as an art,” he says. “But if you copy your moves from an answer key, that’s no longer art.”
...

Even top players like Kim and Shin don’t understand all of AI’s moves. “It seems like it’s thinking in a higher dimension,” she says. When she tries to learn from AI, she adds, “it’s less about rationally thinking through each move, but more about developing a gut feeling—an intuition.”
...

In 2024, researchers at Google DeepMind extracted new chess concepts from AlphaZero, a generalized version of AlphaGo Zero that can also play chess, and taught them to chess grandmasters using chess puzzles.
...

“Top-tier players haven’t yet been able to deduce the general principles behind AI moves,” says Nam Chi-hyung, a Go professor at Myongji University. [Graham's interjection: today's NNs are finding a large number of surface level patterns rather than the deep underlying ones]
...

Even if AI is an opaque teacher, it’s a democratic one. It has supercharged training for female Go players, who have long been underdogs of the game... ...More broadly, AI has narrowed the gap between players by helping everyone perfect their opening moves.
...

Analyzing male players’ ["experts"] moves with AI has shattered their veneer of infallibility... ..."Now, I know that they make mistakes, and their moves aren’t always brilliant"
...

“I may be one of the strongest human players, but with AI around, I can’t be so arrogant,” he says. “AI gives me a reason to keep improving.”

1)"AI has narrowed the gap between players by helping everyone perfect their opening moves."

It is correct if we assume all players have the same memory but I think it is logical to think that top players have a better memory and can memorize more opening moves relative to weaker players with the same training time and in this case top players can still get an advantage from the opening against weaker players.

2)I wonder what is the reason for difference between chess and go because in chess we do not see a reduction of the gap between males and females.

I wonder if go engines helped humans to improve relatively more than chess engines.
In this case what is the reasons:

possible reasons(only a guess and do not know if a correct guess):
a)Playing correctly the opening is more important in go relative to chess.
b)There are too many equal moves in chess and it is not the case in go so in go it is easier to study opening 20 moves forward relative to chess.

[towforce]

2)I wonder what is the reason for difference between chess and go because in chess we do not see a reduction of the gap between males and females.

With apologies to the global Go community if I'm wrong, but my reading of the article is that the game of Go was less accessible to women than it was to men in some countries in which Go is a big game - and especially at the top level, where the teaching methodology was for the student to live in the house of the master.

I wonder if go engines helped humans to improve relatively more than chess engines. In this case what is the reasons:

The most important thing about Go is that it's a more complex game than chess: in most positions, there are a lot more choices of move than there are in chess. This is what makes it a less "computer friendly" game than chess in the first place: the game tree grows too large too quickly.

[Uri Blass]

2)I wonder what is the reason for difference between chess and go because in chess we do not see a reduction of the gap between males and females.

With apologies to the global Go community if I'm wrong, but my reading of the article is that the game of Go was less accessible to women than it was to men in some countries in which Go is a big game - and especially at the top level, where the teaching methodology was for the student to live in the house of the master.

I wonder if go engines helped humans to improve relatively more than chess engines. In this case what is the reasons:

The most important thing about Go is that it's a more complex game than chess: in most positions, there are a lot more choices of move than there are in chess. This is what makes it a less "computer friendly" game than chess in the first place: the game tree grows too large too quickly.

I know that go is more complex relative to chess.

I do not know that go is less computer friendly game than chess.
It may be the opposite and because go is so complex humans simply have no idea how to play it when it is different in chess.

I understand that In go humans had no idea what is the best move in the opening and maybe they became 200 elo stronger thanks to learning opening moves from engines(I do not know)