Hi there!
Boy, there are a LOT of assumptions being made in your post!
I’m just a humble DDK, but I’ve been fascinated by the strength of various AI bots, and the differences between human play and AI play for a while. I’m also fascinated by the differences in tabula-rasa learning bots vs bots trained on a mixture of human games and self play. I’ve written a few times about Centaur go, and doing teaching games where both players use an AI assist as a departure point for learning about strategy, and discussing the pro/cons of a given move
And that’s just me.
Indicating that an experienced go player from the OGS team (i.e. mark5000) is somehow naive and cannot tell the difference between human play and AI play would seem - oh, I don’t know - ill advised? Since I’m sure mark has seen every variation of this under the sun.
So, let’s just break it down. you’ve got a game where a 9kyu is playing a 7kyu. What would be the factors that would lead one to believe that one of the players is unfairly using AI assistance, or is not a human player at all and just an AI bot responding?
Well, I guess the most obvious tell would be if a player was playing at one skill level for the first 1/2 of the game, and then suddenly started making much higher level moves in the second 1/2 of the game. Was that the case here? Doesn’t seem like it to me…
Alternately, one could make the case that the entire play-style of that player indicated a much higher skill level from the very beginning of the game than their current OGS rating would indicate. Again, I’m not seeing any obvious signs of that in the game in question (but what do I know? I’m just a humble DDK…)
Again, I’m not looking for some Final Answer at the Back of the Book. I’m just trying to explore this new grey area we are finding ourselves in, where the go players of the world suddenly have all of these amazing high-level AI tools that anyone can use for free, and the only thing that really keeps us from just cheating all the time is this idea that it’s our actual skill in the game which is important - and not some abstract number reflecting how many games we’ve won, and that constantly depending on bots will actually hamper our learning more than enabling it in the end.
With all that in mind, I’m genuinely curious as to what clues indicate to you (and to the OP) that the play style of their opponent was a bot? Was it a sudden apparent jump in skill level? Was it a certain un-orthodoxy in move order or tactics? What was it about the style of play that hit the OP’s “this-is-bot-ness” receptors?
Thoughts?