See also article in Financial Times
Apparently, a human (Kellin Pelrine, a solid player but not even a Go professional) was able to beat some state-of-the-art Go AIs (KataGo and Leela Zero) by learning to play an adversarial policy found using RL. Notice that he studied the policy before the match and didn't receive any AI advice during play.
I'm not surprised adversarial policies for Go AIs are possible, this is in line with previous results about RL and adversarial examples more generally. I am surprised this adversarial policy is teachable to humans without colossal effort.
This is some evidence against the "scaling hypothesis", i.e. evidence that something non-trivial and important is missing from modern deep learning in order to reach AGI. The usual counterargument to the argument from adversarial examples is: maybe if we could directly access a human brain, we could find adversarial examples against humans. I can believe that it's possible to defeat a Go professional by some extremely weird strategy that causes them to have a seizure or something in that spirit. But, is there a way to do this that another human can learn to use fairly easily? This stretches credulity somewhat.
Notice also that (AFAIK) there's no known way to inoculate an AI against an adversarial policy without letting it play many times against it (after which a different adversarial policy can be found). Whereas even if there's some easy way to "trick" a Go professional, they probably wouldn't fall for it twice.
I'm a bit confused on this point. It doesn't feel intuitive to me that you need a strategy so weird that it causes them to have a seizure (or something in that spirit). Chess preparation for example and especially world championship prep, often involves very deep lines calculated such that the moves chosen aren't the most optimal given perfect play, but which lead a human opponent into an unfavourable position. One of my favourite games, for example, involves a position where at one point black is up three pawns and a bishop, and is still in a losing position (analysis) (This comment is definitely not just a front to take an opportunity to gush over this game).
The kind of idea I mention is also true of new styles. The hypermodern school of play or the post-AlphaZero style would have led to newer players being able to beat earlier players of greater relative strength, in a way that I think would be hard to recognize from a single game even for a GM.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, but the "confusion" the go-playing programs have here seems to be one that no human player beyond the beginner stage would have. They seem to be missing a fundamental aspect of the game.
Perhaps the issue is that go is a game where intuitive judgements plus some tree search get you a long way, but there are occasional positions in which it's necessary to use (maybe even devise and prove) what one might call a "theorem". One is that "a group is unconditionally alive if it has two eyes", with the correct... (read more)