I, along with many fans of Go around the world, have been amazed and surprised at the power of Google DeepMind’s AI program AlphaGo, which has burst on the international Go scene in a monumental way, and threatens to change the dynamic and thinking about this great game in a very big way.

Go is originally a Chinese game, but is played extensively also in Japan and Korea, and other Asian countries, along with the rest of the world. Here in Sydney we are very lucky to have a high ranking Korean professional, Young-gil An (8D) to help promote the game and give teaching lessons. I will be heading to the Sydney Go Club this evening, to hear him analyse the second game in the historical match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top ranked professional GO players. AlphaGo has won both of the first two games of this ground breaking series of 5, which are being played over the next week in Seoul.

I watched much of the second game on YouTube, and loved Michael Redmond’s analysis of the game, and the associated comments by Chris Garlock. You can find the entire game and commentary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-GsfyVCBu0.

I felt that the innovative aspects of AlphaGo’s opening play were particularly noteworthy. Lee Sedol knows that AlphaGo has records of hundreds of thousands of games in its data base (okay probably millions, since it has been playing itself a lot, which is a very unique and interesting way for it to impove), and so if it departs from very standard and traditionally respected patterns in the opening–the question naturally arises: does it know something that he, or other professional GO players, don’t?

This was perhaps most striking with the shoulder hit move on the fourth line stone at B37. Most of us amateurs would have been delighted to press along the fourth line making territory, but I guess Lee Sedol perhaps thought that would be submissive. Great stuff though.

I must admit that the awe and respect I have for the DeepMind team in creating such a powerful program is tempered with a bittersweet sadness that one of the really fundamentally human intellectual disciplines has been caught up to with our computers.

We can’t help but think: when will pure mathematics fall?