Wednesday January 31, 2018
The holiday hiatus is over! In a short video today, Chris Garlock and Michael Redmond 9P confirmed that they’re resuming the popular 
weekly series of AlphaGo game reviews on the AGA’s YouTube channel. The duo update viewers on their plans for the video commentaries, as well as their ongoing AlphaGo book project. The new series starts this Friday with a Redmond Review of a recent tournament game by Redmond, and the AlphaGo videos resume next week.
Friday January 26, 2018
“When will we see the next Michael Redmond/AlphaGo video on YouTube? It’s been more than a month since the last video,” 
writes George Shutack. “I am huge fan of the video series with Michael Redmond and Chris Garlock,” says Brian Aronson. “I have watched every video, often the night they are posted. I find Michael’s analysis substantially more detailed and understandable than any other commentaries that I have seen, and I appreciate Garlock’s occasional questions when Redmond’s analysis goes over my head. Are you two planning to continue your video series?”
In a word, yes. Redmond and Garlock took a break from the videos over the holidays to recharge and to focus on their AlphaGo book project, “which is coming along very nicely,” says Garlock. More on that soon, he promises. Redmond also took the opportunity to work on sgf commentaries for both Zero and Master games, as well as some of his own recent tournament games, and the two – along with producer Michael Wanek – have returned to the studio to begin production of the new series, which is expected to launch on Friday, February 2, with a sneak peek update from Redmond and Garlock on January 31. “The response to the videos has been quite amazing,” Redmond said. “I’m really pleased that so many go players are enjoying them and look forward to continuing to explore AlphaGo’s exciting games in the months ahead.”
Redmond on AlphaGo Zero vs Master
Redmond on AlphaGo SelfPlay
Redmond’s Reviews
Sunday January 14, 2018
The advent of AlphaGo has inspired…well, many things. Chief among them, of course, is self-reflection among serious go players:
What is it like to be superseded by artificial intelligence? Conversely, what can AlphaGo teach us about being human? Google’s AI inspired a movie, a belief that future health care will be better, endless cartoons and the belief that soon Al will be able to create knowledge itself. But music? It seems so. The Shanghai Restoration Project (SRP), a contemporary electronic music duo of Dave Liang and Sun Yunfan, recently dropped their new album R.U.R., with a single entitled “Alpha Go.” The group tells the E-Journal that R.U.R. explores a world in where robots have supplanted the extinct human civilization that predated them. ‘Alpha Go,’ the musicians say, is both “a tribute and an elegy” to Ke Jie’s defeat by the Google AI; it mixes in human elements with decidedly artificial ones. The tune is an airy, abstract melody. It’s evenly paced but turns on a dime, delivered by Yunfan ‘s vocals, which are digitally manipulated. Both musicians played go growing up, with Ms. Sun playing briefly for her school team. The cover art for the album is currently on display at NYC’s Society Of Illustrators until Jan 27 as part of the Illustrators 60 exhibition. “Alpha Go” can be listened to on YouTube or the SRP website.
– Charles “Doc” Sade, with thanks to Santana Afton for the tip
Thursday January 4, 2018
“AlphaGo” — the 2017 documentary about the 2016 showdown between the AlphaGo AI and Lee Sedol, is now streaming on 
Netflix. Directed by Greg Kohs with an original score by Academy Award nominee, Hauschka, AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of Google DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?
Both “AlphaGo” and “The Surrounding Game” — which follows the lives of three young Americans vying to become the first-ever Western professional players — will screen later this month in Portland, OR. The Surrounding Game screens on Jan. 13th at 7:30 and AlphaGo on Jan. 14th at 7:30, both at the Documentary Film Center (corner of NE Williams and Tillamook). “We’re also going to hold a small teaching session at 6PM on the 14th for new players to learn how to play the game. Players can sign up on the 13th for the free teaching session,” reports Peter Freedman.
“We’ll be selling tickets for $8 per night or $14 for both nights,” Freedman adds; email him at pleefreedman1@comcast.net. Raffle tickets will be a dollar and will be sold at the Surrounding Game screening. The raffle drawing will occur at the end of the screening. “We’ll have some popcorn and non-alcoholic beverages for free and beer for sale on both nights.”
Sunday December 17, 2017
“I think Master made a mistake fairly early in this game,” says Michael Redmond 9p in his fourth commentary on the AG Zero
games. “Then it was supposed to be an easy game for Zero, but Zero made it really interesting, and there are points in the game where I think Master had a chance to win. There’s a big fight toward the end.”
Click here for Redmond’s video commentary, hosted by the AGA E-Journal’s Chris Garlock, and see below for the sgf commentary. To support this content, please consider joining or renewing your membership in the American Go Association; click here for details.
Note: The video commentary team will be taking a break over the holidays to rest up, recharge and work on plans for 2018. Watch for a 2017 recap interview coming soon and more updates and videos in the New Year!
Video produced by Michael Wanek and Andrew Jackson. The sgf files were created by Redmond, with editing and transcription by Garlock and Myron Souris.
Monday December 11, 2017
Being a collection of interesting items – in no particular order – that have landed in our in-box in recent months but never 
made it into the E-Journal.
Legend of the Five Rings: Fantasy Flight Games publishes a card game called “Legend of the Five Rings” which takes inspiration from Japanese, Chinese, and Korean history and legend. A short story posted to FFG’s website contains an image of a gentleman engaged in an interesting game of go while holding a white stone correctly. The short story, itself, contains a discussion between two characters about Shogi, with a passing comment that one prefers the “purity” of go.
– Joe Marino
Atari origins: “Started in 1972, Atari was named by one of its founders, Nolan Bushnell, for a move in the ancient Asian game of Go. ‘Atari was what you said to your opponent if you put their stones in jeopardy, kind of like check in chess,’ Mr. Bushnell explained in an interview. ‘I just thought it was a cool word and a cool name.’ From Atari (Remember It?), a New Console With Old Games, in The New York Times 11/24/2017
Bushnell gave the keynote address at the 2012 Go Congress.
– Ted Terpstra
Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself? As machine learning becomes more powerful, the field’s researchers increasingly find themselves unable to account for what their algorithms know — or how they know it.
– From The New York Times, 11/21/2017
Friday December 8, 2017
“AG Zero and the Ke Jie version sort of resemble each other, in the way that they play around the 3-3 invasions, and there’s a 
‘taste’ to their play that’s quite similar,” says Michael Redmond 9p in his third commentary on the AG Zero games. “That said, the Ke Jie version tends to jump into fights more quickly and that’s very exciting, but in the Zero version, there’s a lot of hidden reading, like we saw in Game 2. Just as Master did against human players, Zero is controlling the game to a much greater degree, and a lot of the reading is not actually coming out on the board.”
“In this game, Master has black again and will be playing a lot of moves towards the center,” Redmond says. “So there are lot of stones floating around in the center of the board and looking kind of neat. I think Master had a good opening in this game and then there’s one move I really don’t like, that’s really the turning point of the game. And just like when I’m playing a formidable player, I find that just one move can turn things very sour quite quickly.”
Click here for Redmond’s video commentary, hosted by the AGA E-Journal’s Chris Garlock, and see below for the sgf commentary. To support this content, please consider joining or renewing your membership in the American Go Association; click here for details.
Video produced by Michael Wanek and Andrew Jackson. The sgf files were created by Redmond, with editing and transcription by Garlock and Myron Souris.
Thursday December 7, 2017
Chess changed forever today. And maybe the rest of the world did, too.
A little more than a year after AlphaGo sensationally won against the top Go player, the artificial-intelligence program AlphaZero has obliterated the highest-rated chess engine.
Stockfish, which for most top players is their go-to preparation tool, and which won the 2016 TCEC Championship and the 2017 Chess.com Computer Chess Championship, didn’t stand a chance. AlphaZero won the closed-door, 100-game match with 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses.
Oh, and it took AlphaZero only four hours to “learn” chess. Sorry humans, you had a good run.
That’s right — the programmers of AlphaZero, housed within the DeepMind division of Google, had it use a type of “machine learning,” specifically reinforcement learning. Put more plainly, AlphaZero was not “taught” the game in the traditional sense. That means no opening book, no endgame tables, and apparently no complicated algorithms dissecting minute differences 
between center pawns and side pawns.
This would be akin to a robot being given access to thousands of metal bits and parts, but no knowledge of a combustion engine, then it experiments numerous times with every combination possible until it builds a Ferrari. That’s all in less time that it takes to watch the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. The program had four hours to play itself many, many times, thereby becoming its own teacher.
“It’s a remarkable achievement, even if we should have expected it after AlphaGo,” GM Garry Kasparov told Chess.com. “It approaches the ‘Type B,’ human-like approach to machine chess dreamt of by Claude Shannon and Alan Turing instead of brute force.”
You can read the full paper here. GM Peter Heine Nielsen said that “After reading the paper but especially seeing the games I thought, well, I always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on earth and showed us how they play chess. I feel now I know.”
After the Stockfish match, AlphaZero then “trained” for only two hours and then beat the best Shogi-playing computer program “Elmo.”
“[This is] actual artificial intelligence,” said Nielsen. “It goes from having something that’s relevant to chess to something that’s gonna win Nobel Prizes or even bigger than Nobel Prizes. I think it’s basically cool for us that they also decided to do four hours on chess because we get a lot of knowledge. We feel it’s a great day for chess but of course it goes so much further.”
Excerpted from Mike Klein’s December 6 report on chess.com. photo: Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis (right) playing with Michael Adams at the ProBiz event at Google Headquarters London just a few days ago. | Photo: Maria Emelianova/Chess.com.
Wednesday December 6, 2017
rental and purchase.“This is such a beautiful telling of this historic moment,” comments Ben Murdoch on the site. “An intimate and at times tense portrayal of a milestone moment in AI history. Captivating!” says Marek Barwiński.
AlphaGo Zero-AlphaGo Master #5: Strange and wild stuff happening
Sunday February 11, 2018
“There’s some strange stuff in this game, especially in the early part of the game,” says Michael Redmond 9p in his fifth
commentary on the AG Zero games. “Then later on things get really exciting, as Zero does some amazing stuff inside Master’s moyo. The sequence that Zero uses to reduce the moyo is quite spectacular.”
Click here for Redmond’s video commentary, hosted by the AGA E-Journal’s Chris Garlock, and see below for the sgf commentary. To support this content, please consider joining or renewing your membership in the American Go Association; click here for details.
Video produced by Michael Wanek and Andrew Jackson. The sgf files were created by Redmond, with editing and transcription by Garlock and Myron Souris.
[link]