Chapter 1 (Part 1) of my book: The hype, the hubris, and the day we all thought Lee Sedol would crush AlphaGo.

General Chat
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Hi everyone, it’s Uno again. Following up on the introduction I shared a little while ago, I’ve just published the first part of Chapter 1 of my book, Infinity on the Tip of Your Finger, on Medium.

This section is a trip down memory lane to March 2016. I explore what it was like in Korea during the sudden mainstream hype of the “Match of the Century,” where suddenly even non-players were asking who would win.

More importantly, I dive into the sheer hubris our community had right before the fall. I break down:

1. Why the pro community completely dismissed Fan Hui’s defeat to AlphaGo (“So what? We got Mike Tyson right here”).

2. The cultural weight of the Dan system, specifically the title of Ip Shin (9 Dan).

3. How our top masters sincerely believed they had entered the realm of gods and were virtually untouchable by a machine.

4. It sets the stage for the collective shock that we all experienced when Game 1 finally happened.

You can read Part 1 here: Infinity on the Tip of Your Finger - Chapter 1 (part 1)

Looking forward to your thoughts!

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I’m already waiting for the next chapter. I hope we don’t digress more on the ranking system, that’s not what I’m waiting, my only surprise is that it seems that in Korea, beginners start at 18k?

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Thanks! Part 2 will be posted soon! And no, the chapter doesn’t dwell on the ranking system for too long, so don’t worry! As for the ranking system , I understand it is a bit different nowadays, especially on online platforms like Tygem, but traditionally beginners were all considered 18K. This is the same for Korea and Japan (not so sure about China though).

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“we all thought Lee Sedol would crush AlphaGo.”

I didn’t. I mean, not that I predicted the outcome, but I certainly wasn’t convinced about human superiority.

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Yes, it’s not accurate to think that we “all” thought Lee Sedol would crush AlphaGo. But many top professionals thought so. See

(paragraph “Responses”).

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There are lots of historical news I find in our local chat forum (ptt.cc), there were Korean news, and Chinese news

李世石和人工智能“阿尔法围棋”对决规则最终敲定 | 韩联社 I can only find the Chinese translated ones (the original Korean news site was gone), on Feb 23, the expectation (albeit from deepmind team) was 50/50 (matching what Aja had said when he came back to Taiwan for talks)

And the Chinese news/analysis on Mar 5, 2016 (it is a very long analysis with 2 pages)

The known fact at the time was that the known testing games on Tygem was about weak pro level (won against Tygem 9d, but lost as well), but it was suspected to be a single server/local version of AlphaGo tested on Tygem, instead of the full strength “networked” version, and the networked version has over 75% winrate against the local version, and the networked version beat Fan Hui last year. And they expected the network version to be at a strong pro level and predicted Lee would won 4-1.

And there was an interview of Lee Sedol himself on Mar 8, and his opinion was that he had confidence, but he didn’t think he could won all 5 games easily (so even Lee Sedol himself before the game, didn’t think he can crush AlphaGo)
https://cb.yna.co.kr/gate/big5/cn.yna.co.kr/view/ACK20160308002700881

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