All Things Go Podcast

[00:21] Travis: Hey everybody, we are back for episode two of Unscripted. I'm excited.

[00:28] Travis: Hopefully everybody is enjoying it. I'm really liking the different schedule and sense of preparation for these compared to the first four seasons of interviews.

How AI Is Changing Professional Go

[00:41] Travis: All right, so we got a bunch of stuff to talk about today and the first thing I thought we would talk about would be the MIT article on the game of Go and artificial intelligence.

[00:55] Travis: And this article was written by Michelle Kim, I believe.

[00:58] Travis: And it's funny actually she reached out to me and was asking if I could help her get in touch with some people that interviewed for the show to talk intelligibly about AI and Go and understand AI systems.

[01:15] Travis: So I tried to connect her with a few different people.

[01:19] Travis: But let's take a look at that article.

[01:23] Travis: So it looks like she was able to connect with Shin Jin-seo the top pro in the whole world.

[01:31] Travis: But maybe it was over email or something. It doesn't look like she had a full on conversation.

[01:36] Travis: I've been actually trying to connect with Shin Jin-seo and some people have been really nice in the Korean Go scene to try to connect me to him.

[01:44] Travis: It hasn't panned out so far, so fingers crossed. Hopefully one day that will happen. Be really cool to interview him.

[01:52] Travis: But the interview,

[01:54] Travis: excuse me. The article was really interesting.

[01:58] Travis: It kind of goes back and talks about where everything started with AlphaGo and then Lee Sedol playing and those sorts of things.

[02:08] Travis: Kind of takes us through a history of Go,

[02:10] Travis: which is great.

[02:12] Travis: It talks a bit about how Shin Jin-seo spends a lot of his time training with AI to prepare for matches,

[02:19] Travis: which I don't think is new for any of us that follow the Go world a bit.

[02:27] Travis: But then the article goes on to try to talk about how the AI system has really reshaped how people play the game.

[02:34] Travis: I thought this was interesting. So she says the software has reshaped how people play. For hundreds of years, professional Go players have navigated the game's astronomical complexity by developing heuristics that replaced brute force or brute calculation.

[02:49] Travis: And she kind of seems to go on to say that it's taken away a lot of the creativity of the game and that now players memorize the same line of moves and that's more calculated in the opening because of AI,

[03:09] Travis: and that now the game has shifted more to the middle or the mid game and you really need a lot of raw calculation that matters more.

[03:17] Travis: I'm sure this is probably true,

[03:21] Travis: but I still feel like I hear from players of much higher rank than myself say that there's still tons of just openness and flexibility and creativity in the game.

[03:35] Travis: I do remember,

[03:37] Travis: and I mentioned this in a previous episode, that one of the top players in the world. Ding Hao a Chinese player said something about in some random interview I found I can't find it since I found it on Reddit, maybe somebody out there knows where it is.

[03:51] Travis: But there was this like short interview that he did and he talked about how he felt. The irony was the fact that in the age of AI,

[04:04] Travis: you needed to be even more creative to really get ahead and stand out and be like a top level player because there were so many Chinese players doing the same things and knowing the same AI moves.

[04:17] Travis: I'm not sure how true that is.

[04:20] Travis: So that seems to be the big part of the article by Michelle Kim,

[04:25] Travis: kind of talking about how AI has changed the game.

[04:29] Travis: And also it looks like she was able to connect with Lee Sedol, which is really cool. And Lee Sedol said that it's become the game has become a mind sport.

[04:40] Travis: And he said, before AI, we sought out something greater.

[04:43] Travis: I learned to go as an art, he says, but if you copy your moves from an answer key, that's no longer art.

[04:49] Travis: Very interesting.

[04:51] Travis: So, yeah, it was really fun to see this article out there.

[04:54] Travis: Very funny that they reached out to me to see if I knew anybody.

[04:59] Travis: They tried to connect with David Wu, the creator of KataGo, who was really, really nice to speak with me.

[05:05] Travis: I'm not sure if she had any success.

[05:08] Travis: So that was an interesting article.

A Handmade Go Mat from the Community

[05:11] Travis: And then the next thing I want to talk about is some things that were on the r/baduk subreddit.

[05:19] Travis: And one was a person that goes by the handle dustinvader.

[05:27] Travis: And there was sort of like a flurry of different posts that dustinvader put out in the last week or so.

[05:34] Travis: One was about their first Go club experience.

[05:40] Travis: And I think a lot of us just really enjoyed it. I mean, it was such a fun, positive account.

[05:45] Travis: And I love how unapologetic dustinvader was of saying, listen, like, I'm not gonna give a tldr, like you're either in or you're out. I thought that was really fun.

[05:55] Travis: But also they put a post up that they do sewing and do things with cloth and things. And they had made a mat, a Go mat for their board with really cool patterning and stitching and sort of a great fabric that could go underneath your board.

[06:15] Travis: And so I reached out and I said, hey, I would love to have you make Me one, if you're willing. And it was really cool. So I learned that dustinvader goes by, his name is Dustin.

[06:26] Travis: Um, hopefully I'm okay to say that, but he was so great. He reached out to me. I connected with him via direct messaging on Reddit and he was like, yeah, I'm totally excited to make,

[06:41] Travis: you know, a map for your board.

[06:43] Travis: Just give me the dimensions and like, what color would you like for the trimming and everything like that. And I think I just was really struck and appreciative of just how open and friendly another person in the Go community was.

[06:57] Travis: It just really struck me and it was so nice and we were able to work out a situation. He gave me some nice updates. He sent me the mat once he finished it and I just got it in the mail today and I opened it up and it looks awesome.

[07:13] Travis: It's really well made. He got these nice little corner pieces on the mat and there's this nice stitching around the edge with a nice little sort of trim around it.

[07:25] Travis: And it's just a great thing to put between a nice Go board you have and whatever surface you're playing on so that the bottom of your board doesn't get damaged or messed up or anything like that.

[07:36] Travis: But he put a really nice letter in the.

[07:41] Travis: The box the. That he mailed to me with the mat. And he just said, hey,

[07:45] Travis: I hope you like it. If you, if you need anything I got you. Don't worry, like, I'll fix it.

[07:50] Travis: Like, thanks so much. And it was just, it was wonderful. I just was really struck by it. So,

[07:56] Travis: Dustin, if you're out there, thank you very much. I'm super excited for this mat. It fits perfectly. So the dimensions are great.

[08:04] Travis: But I know Dustin was mentioning that he might start this up as just like a little side shop that he does making these sorts of things for the Go community.

[08:14] Travis: So if you are interested, I'll put his handle in the episode notes reach out to Dustin. He goes by dustinvader.

[08:23] Travis: And yeah, thank you again, Dustin. Really, really cool. I'm super excited to use the map.

[08:30] Travis: So Dustin had that other great post about his first Go club experience that was really fun, very positive.

[08:38] Travis: He also had another post about just eye candy with these new slate and shell stones he had purchased.

Edward Lasker, Intelligent Life, and Go

[08:45] Travis: I'm going to move on to the next thing that kind of struck my brain between myself and probably looking at something on Reddit or on the online Go community.

[08:54] Travis: And that is the quote by, I believe it's Edward Lasker,

[09:00] Travis: who is one of the main proponents of Go getting spread to the West.

[09:06] Travis: And he is, I believe, a cousin. I could be wrong there. Don't quote me of Emanuel Lasker, which is. Who is a chess champion.

[09:16] Travis: And I think some of us know the quote by Edward Lasker,

[09:23] Travis: which says something to the effect of the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.

[09:35] Travis: I think that's the quote. It might be slightly off here or there, but that's the quote.

[09:40] Travis: So I was listening to a podcast called Rethinking with organizational psychologist Adam Grant. I've also mentioned this in previous episodes.

[09:50] Travis: And Adam Grant was interviewing an astrophysicist. And of course, what he wanted to do was spend some time talking to the astrophysicist. I believe her last name was Seager. S E A G E R I'll put the episode in the episode notes for anybody who wants to listen to it.

[10:10] Travis: But Adam gets right into it with her about life elsewhere or intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

[10:18] Travis: And there were some really interesting thoughts that that was brought up. This is obviously not directly related to Go, but just to the quote from Edward Lasker.

[10:27] Travis: And the astrophysicist said, you know, it's very possible that there's intelligent life out there,

[10:34] Travis: but it could be that they might know that we're here, but they just don't care to have us know about it. And I never thought of that before. So she gave the example and said,

[10:50] Travis: think of it almost like ants that are on the ground. And if they find a piece of food,

[10:56] Travis: right? If they.

[10:57] Travis: If one ant comes along, finds the piece of food, it goes and tells the other ants. And then a whole bunch of ants come to take the food. They have certain level of intelligence to talk with each other, to get that food, bring it back.

[11:09] Travis: And then there's us, the human, looking down, seeing this happen.

[11:14] Travis: So in this analogy that she's using,

[11:17] Travis: she's kind of saying, what if we are the ants?

[11:20] Travis: So what if we are the people that actually very.

[11:22] Travis: We're intelligent, but our intelligence level is so crude compared to maybe this other intelligent life that we're simply not aware. We're not able to see that there is intelligent life out there.

[11:35] Travis: Or. Or maybe that intelligent life, which in this analogy is us, the human, looking down on the ants.

[11:41] Travis: Maybe they just don't care to.

[11:43] Travis: So that was a very different way of thinking about the whole intelligent life question.

[11:51] Travis: It's a fun one,

[11:53] Travis: but definitely take a listen to that episode it was really good.

[11:57] Travis: All right, next topic.

[11:59] Travis: Excuse me,

Tracing the History of an Ancient Go Board

[12:01] Travis: still getting over my cold is a post about the really cool ancient Go boards that were mentioned on r/baduk.

[12:12] Travis: And really cool to see because it talks about this really fancy sandalwood goban, or Go board.

[12:23] Travis: And the person that posted this,

[12:27] Travis: who then wrote an article about it on Medium,

[12:31] Travis: was just talking about trying to trace the origins of this incredible board with these really, really cool drawings on the side.

[12:38] Travis: The lines are made out of ivory.

[12:41] Travis: Just a really, really cool story.

[12:43] Travis: And it did take me back to an episode I did where I spoke to Professor Chihyung Nam, who's actually the president of the International Society of Go Studies, and she talks about the history of the game of coming from China, but then going up into the Korean Peninsula,

[13:04] Travis: and one of the main peoples in Korea was called Baekje.

[13:09] Travis: And this is exactly what the post talks about, trying to figure out, like, okay,

[13:13] Travis: is this board originally coming from the Tang Dynasty in China or is it coming from the Baekje Kingdom in Korea? So just really fascinating.

[13:24] Travis: I think a lot of us love learning about the history of these sorts of things. So it looks like the author is V. Singh, that's S I N G H,

[13:37] Travis: and he wrote it on March 1st. So very cool, very interesting.

[13:42] Travis: Maybe perhaps I can get a chance to interview him for the show.

[13:47] Travis: So very cool.

[13:52] Travis: All right, let's see, what else do we have here?

Revisiting Jake Kim and Go for a Better World

[14:07] Travis: Next, I want to talk a little bit about the recent season that I released of interviews, and I'm going to start with the first episode. So this was from a few weeks ago,

[14:18] Travis: and I interviewed Jake Kim,

[14:22] Travis: who has the nonprofit Go for a Better World.

[14:26] Travis: And I just wanted to kind of go back and kind of look at it. If you haven't listened to that episode already,

[14:34] Travis: it is a fun one. It's just so great to listen to a young person,

[14:40] Travis: particularly for myself, being 39 years old. I know I'm not by some accounts, old, but I'm also not young.

[14:46] Travis: And it was just really fun to see somebody that was in high school, but really driven and ambitious. And so I just wanted to talk for a minute about some of my reflections on that interview with Jake Kim.

[15:00] Travis: And I know that he actually just went to the event down in Hawaii for the,

[15:10] Travis: I believe it was the Kisei Tournament, the Japanese tournament.

[15:13] Travis: And I think he was down there because he was being celebrated as,

[15:18] Travis: I think, winning an award for one of the best teachers or teacher of the year awards, which is great. But,

[15:24] Travis: yeah, some things that stood out about that conversation Jake talked about how he really struggled. There was about a year long period, I think after he won this social innovation competition where he was really trying to get into these senior centers to do volunteer work about teaching, go to seniors.

[15:43] Travis: And it just wasn't happening. Like places were just either not willing to do it or think any of us who has had to deal with sort of going out and kind of door knocking or trying to get people to get buy in for something.

[15:58] Travis: It just takes time.

[15:59] Travis: And so it was really interesting to hear that it didn't happen overnight. Things weren't easy, they didn't come easy to Jake.

[16:07] Travis: But that he kind of kept trying and he was persistent and kept pushing.

[16:13] Travis: It was also really interesting how he talked about coming to America as a Korean and really feeling just culturally so out of place perhaps, but just really trying to find something to connect to.

[16:29] Travis: He's in this private school that's very competitive, kids are going to really good schools.

[16:35] Travis: And he was sort of asking himself like, okay, what can I focus on or connect to that will maybe help me survive, maybe help me fit in? And he really used go as that thing to really hang on to and connect to and try to bring others in.

[16:54] Travis: And I just found that really inspiring. It was really cool.

[16:58] Travis: He then started doing some work and he got,

[17:02] Travis: excuse me, he made this book about how to teach Go to others and something that he hit upon, which may be revolutionary,

[17:11] Travis: maybe not as revolutionary is the concept of trying to teach people through Capture Go and not trying to get into teaching the more complicated rules of Go around,

[17:22] Travis: illegal moves or ko and those sorts of things, but really just sticking with the basics and using that as a jumping off point if somebody later wants to get into the standard rules.

[17:35] Travis: So I thought that was really cool.

[17:37] Travis: He then talks a bit about like the trade off between teaching kids versus teaching senior citizens. And I thought it was really interesting. He said kids learn really crazy fast, but it's hard keeping that focus with them.

[17:51] Travis: Also because of all the other things that kids can do nowadays.

[17:54] Travis: And then with the seniors,

[17:56] Travis: of course they may not learn as quickly as the kids, right. They just don't have the synapses firing quite as much.

[18:04] Travis: But he was getting a sense that they were much more engaged, much more interested in learning the game.

[18:11] Travis: It's funny, it's like I tie it back to my personal life and I'm just so aware of a few things. One is like I came into this game very late and so I realized that probably my ceiling is fairly limited in terms of how advanced I can get in the game,

[18:27] Travis: and if you just strip out, like, rank and rank focus,

[18:31] Travis: it's something where I'm like, okay, if I.

[18:33] Travis: I already play. I devote a decent amount of time to this game. Like, if you ask my wife,

[18:39] Travis: she will say, oh, yeah, like Travis, this is something that he devotes probably the most time to outside of his work and outside of his family life.

[18:51] Travis: So I devote a decent amount of time to it. Granted, I don't have a ton of time right now in this kind of phase of life, but,

[18:57] Travis: um, even still,

[18:59] Travis: you know, my speed of improvement has. You know, it's not fast, it's quite slow.

[19:05] Travis: And I do see other people where they are playing just.

[19:11] Travis: Just crazy numbers of games. Like, if I go on the Online Go Server and I see some of the opponents that I'm playing.

[19:16] Travis: I have played about maybe 300 games in the past,

[19:21] Travis: I don't know, three years, something like this. I started back in 2022 in earnest, really, playing games.

[19:29] Travis: And a lot of the opponents, I mean, they're playing thousands of games over the same period of time or over a way shorter period of time. And so, first of all, I'm like, wow, how can you play so many games in one day?

[19:43] Travis: Like, how do you have the time to do that?

[19:46] Travis: Perhaps they're. They're kids, or perhaps they're just having a different situation in life, but you really need to have that much volume to really explode leaps and bounds in your improvement.

[19:56] Travis: And it helps if you're younger, right? And your brain is a little more having that neuroplasticity.

[20:03] Travis: The last thing I took away from that conversation with Jake was that he really enjoyed some of the very genuine conversations he had with some of the seniors. So I think he was talking about how.

[20:16] Travis: How one thing one of the seniors valued the most is that if they were going out to, like, a dance or a prom,

[20:23] Travis: that,

[20:24] Travis: you know, they could get a ride with somebody to drive home safely at night, because that's something that they can't do on their own just because of, you know, some physical limitations.

[20:35] Travis: And so he said that really stuck with him. And it sounds like one of those things that's really gonna shape Jake's life, give him a bit more life experience.

Research on Go and Cognitive Health

[20:45] Travis: So it's really cool to see. I actually was curious because one thing Jake was talking about is he was trying to really focus on the concept that Go can be a way to improve cognitive ability or slow cognitive decline in seniors, and that it was, you know, the next best way outside of sort of medicine and drugs for people.

[21:09] Travis: And so I think, like a lot of us, I was trying to look into it more online and just see, like, okay, what studies have there been about this out in the world?

[21:19] Travis: And so I was able to find some studies. And I did want to focus on what's called the nih, the National Institutes of Health, because I think that's a relatively reputable place to have studies published.

[21:37] Travis: And so what I did is I just asked,

[21:41] Travis: you know, one of the AI engines, hey, can you just find me some studies there?

[21:46] Travis: And it was interesting. There were a few. There was one with children with adhd, which is like attention deficit disorder,

[21:53] Travis: where this was back in 2014. They took 17 children that weren't taking drugs and were diagnosed with ADHD. And then they matched them with 17 kids of similar age as a control group.

[22:08] Travis: And they played Go with instruction for 16 weeks,

[22:12] Travis: for two hours a day, for five days a week. And they kind of measured their. Their symptoms. And so they did see, they looked at for a couple different things.

[22:20] Travis: So one, they. They were trying to measure levels of inattention or hyperactivity or impulsivity, but they're also looking for something called digit span, which I guess is some sort of proxy for verbal working memory.

[22:35] Travis: Um, and so what they found was that there were significant reductions in ADHD symptoms,

[22:41] Travis: There was an improvement in less inattention,

[22:46] Travis: and there were increases in the ability to have sort of working memory.

[22:50] Travis: And so that's really great to hear.

[22:52] Travis: Um, another study was with older adults and looking at cognitive decline. It was a random, randomized, controlled trial in a nursing home sort of setting.

[23:02] Travis: And they would do regular, structured Go sessions, like what I think Jake Kim does with his nonprofit.

[23:10] Travis: And they were taught the rules of the game, and they would play over time. And it looks like they would also measure, again, working memory and attention.

[23:20] Travis: And it looks like there were statistically significant improvements in working memory and in reducing cognitive decline.

[23:31] Travis: There was one final study that was found, and this was through the look of Go as a board game in neuroplasticity research.

[23:42] Travis: And so this one, they would effectively do an MRI scan of Go players and showed the different sort of places that their brains were activating.

[23:52] Travis: And what they found was that,

[23:55] Travis: you know, this sort of imaging suggested that playing Go or a board game like Go for longer periods of time was actually positively connected to good changes in the brain activity around various things that would support complex cognition.

[24:16] Travis: So those things all sound positive. Now, I wasn't going to take that at face value. I think we all have to be very careful with AI, of course. So I just asked, I was just like, okay, how reputable are these studies?

[24:31] Travis: The main challenge with the studies is that the sample sizes were a bit smaller in two of the studies.

[24:41] Travis: So that's challenging. There wasn't as much follow up research done over a long period of time and there wasn't really any mention of sort of like double blind tests in there.

[24:54] Travis: So it's really, obviously it's hard to say that there's a strong correlation or strong causal relationship or anything like that, but very positive. So if Jake can realize his dream,

[25:08] Travis: per the reveal he made on the interview,

[25:10] Travis: of really wanting to make his organization a research based education organization around this,

[25:16] Travis: that would be really cool, I think, for a lot of us to see.

[25:22] Travis: Pardon my slurping, if you are listening to me, drink some tea.

Closing Thoughts

[25:46] Travis: All right, well, I think that's everything for today.

[25:48] Travis: Thanks for listening. And next time I think we'll cover kind of similar things. Anything that popped up for the week.

[25:55] Travis: As always, let me know if there's any questions or anything you want to discuss or talk about.

[25:59] Travis: That's kind of a new fun thing we can do in this format.

[26:03] Travis: And we'll probably touch on the next interview that I did for the season and that would be with Peter Doggers,

[26:12] Travis: who wrote the book the Chess Revolution.

[26:14] Travis: So stay tuned. Thanks for listening and talk to you next time.

[26:21] Travis: Sam.