All Things Go Podcast

[00:00] Travis: This episode is sponsored by Baduk Pop and SmartGo One.

[00:28] Travis: All right, everybody. It is another episode of All Things Go unscripted.

[00:33] Travis: We're going to get started.

[00:35] Travis: So we do have a couple themes this week.

[00:38] Travis: One theme is going to be the 10 year anniversary of AlphaGo and that being a really pivotal moment.

[00:45] Travis: So we're going to do some deep diving into that event and it actually ties in really nicely with going through some of the interviews from season four of the show, which was just released in mid February.

[01:00] Travis: Because on this episode we're going to talk a little bit about my conversation with Peter Doggers, who's over at Chess.com and wrote the book the Chess Revolution and talked about how he thinks chess became so big and how it blew up so quickly in recent times.

[01:17] Travis: So we'll get into that a little bit.

[01:20] Travis: Then after that I'm going to touch on some things that I saw on the Ar/baduk subreddit.

[01:24] Travis: Some fun posts and interesting things and then a couple other random things that came along the way. One I got from my wife, so I'm incredibly impressed with her.

[01:35] Travis: She's a regular reader of the New York Times and she came across a really great movie review.

[01:40] Travis: So that will be something else we'll talk about.

Ten Years Since AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol

[01:44] Travis: All right, first up, let's start with AlphaGo. So it was 10 years ago that the famous AlphaGo matches happened. I can't believe it's already 10 years ago.

[01:54] Travis: I was not yet into the game.

[01:57] Travis: I was definitely an AlphaGo person. That's what got me into the game.

[02:02] Travis: And as I mentioned, probably in one of my first episodes of the show,

[02:08] Travis: the AlphaGo documentary was on Netflix and I think I had my dad and my stepmom were in the area.

[02:16] Travis: They had come down for a visit and we were flipping around and we saw it and so we watched some of it. But then they had to leave. And then later I watched the rest of it and obviously the rest is history.

[02:28] Travis: So there is a really great one hour podcast from Google DeepMind that interviewed two of,

[02:37] Travis: well, they weren't both there at the time. It was, I believe,

[02:41] Travis: Thore Graepel who was involved with Google DeepMind at the time. And then Pushmeet Kohli, who I think is somebody in the research department at Google DeepMind who's very knowledgeable about all of that.

[02:53] Travis: And so it's a one hour video podcast. It was interesting. I mean, I can't say it was riveting, but there were some interesting points to it. So I do find it interesting that they talk about the moves being intuitive or intuition.

[03:12] Travis: And it's interesting how as I have played the game and gotten better and keep in mind, I am only around a 9-10 kyu on the Online Go Server, so certainly not a dan-level player or anything like that that I feel like reading is actually super important.

[03:29] Travis: And the only way you develop quote unquote intuition in this game is by playing a lot of games and getting a sense for what works and what doesn't shape all those sorts of things.

[03:39] Travis: So this term of intuition, when I remember watching the documentary originally and they talk about how, you know, Go is this game where intuition is very important.

[03:48] Travis: I get it, I understand. Like, yes, intuition comes into play after you have played thousands of games and you are quite advanced because you built that subconscious library of pattern recognition and now you have intuition.

[04:04] Travis: You look at the board, you look at a certain game state and you can see, okay, these moves are screaming out at me or there's something going on there. But for me,

[04:14] Travis: I feel like I'm at a stage where, yes, I'm building intuition all the time, but I'm really only about, I think 300 to 350 games into this journey of building intuition.

[04:27] Travis: And so for me, I feel like I have to read everything out. I feel poor at reading, obviously, always trying to improve, but that just stood out at me.

[04:36] Travis: In this one hour podcast about AlphaGo,

[04:41] Travis: they were also talking about how at the time, Lee Sedol was sort of perceived as the Roger Federer of Go at the time.

[04:50] Travis: And when I remember watching AlphaGo originally, they made it sound like Lee Sedol was sort of at the top or the height of his playing ability.

[05:02] Travis: I believe I've learned since then that that was actually not the case. I think I've read and spoken to different people that said Lee Sedol was really a top player before these events took place.

[05:15] Travis: And then I know later Ke Jie did play against AlphaGo and lost. And I think that's when it was more accepted that AI and computers could really beat the best players in Go.

[05:29] Travis: So I don't think that was intentionally trying to be misleading or anything like that, but I kind of liken it almost to if you had, you know, Michael Jordan play, I don't know, some sort of robot machine or something like this and play better than Michael Jordan.

[05:46] Travis: Well, sure, if he's been retired for a bunch of years,

[05:50] Travis: that always is going to give you sort of pause or have you question whether it's really better than a human.

Move 37, Move 78, and Human Creativity

[05:56] Travis: Then they get into move 37 in the second game of the AlphaGo matches and how that was a really big move because it was a shoulder hit on the fifth line.

[06:10] Travis: And normally shoulder hits are done on the fourth line because there is that important interplay on the third and fourth line of the board that goes all around the board of sort of territory and influence.

[06:22] Travis: And that is generally perceived to be a fair trade in most situations.

[06:28] Travis: They made it sound like that's now a thing that's done all the time. That could be the case at the top level in the pros. I don't really know. I'm not watching professional games a whole lot.

[06:37] Travis: So maybe fifth line shoulder hits are now very normal in professional play or top level play. But I know at my level I don't really see it. And it's still not considered to be necessarily a logical move to play if you're trying to learn how to play Go.

[06:56] Travis: Well,

[06:57] Travis: this ties back into this whole thing around,

[07:01] Travis: okay, great. Now we have an AI system that's way better than humans or even the top human,

[07:07] Travis: and it will show the best move. But that best move is according to an AI system that can have incredible capability and calculating ability that we don't as humans. And so it just makes you think like, okay, great, we have it.

[07:23] Travis: But really the next generation or the next step in all of this is building out systems using AI that can help humans find sort of the best human move. If they can get that to align with our logic and rationale and understanding and rules of thumb, that will be really big.

[07:42] Travis: And that is a good shout out to my interview with Professor Marius Lindauer in Germany. He's trying to look at that quite a bit.

[07:51] Travis: Okay then in the DeepMind podcast for the 10th anniversary, they talk a little bit more about game four when Move 78 is played. And this was the famous wedge move played by Lee Sedol.

[08:08] Travis: And I think at the time it was perceived as being sort of like a divine move,

[08:13] Travis: which for those of us who know, you know. But if you don't know and you're not familiar, it was sort of perceived as seeing like as being a sort of incredible move, maybe once in a lifetime move,

[08:25] Travis: maybe once on generation move of just really finding something that really changes the game and is sort of beautiful in its own way.

[08:34] Travis: So if you go on to Korean professional Yeonwoo,

[08:41] Travis: you'll see that she has a video that talks about how Lee Sedol actually came out and said that actually this divine move was really a trick move.

[08:56] Travis: And again, a trick move is pretty different from the divine move Because a trick move is sort of something where you know that there's some sort of reaction that may result in you getting a little advantage versus a divine move, which is something that is considered to be the ultimate form of creativity and just sort of an amazing move.

[09:21] Travis: So that was interesting.

[09:22] Travis: I honestly can't judge whether it was still deemed a good move or not. But again,

[09:28] Travis: DeepMind is sort of making it like it was this amazing move. And maybe it was, but it seems like since then both Lee Sedol and again pro Yeonwoo have talked about how it really wasn't quite that.

[09:40] Travis: I think to a degree.

[09:42] Travis: They also talk about how they felt like the AlphaGo games provided a quote unquote lift to the Go community. Like it provided a boost of inspiration or something to the Go community.

[09:57] Travis: But everybody I speak to makes it sound like it was almost like this tragic event, right? Kind of the downfall of the game in a way, because now humans weren't the best at it.

[10:09] Travis: And it was almost like a.

[10:11] Travis: A solved. Not quite a solved, but a figured out endeavor.

[10:17] Travis: And so that's not the vibe I get. Just different from what I'm. Of course there are exceptions. I'm sure some people thought different of it now. I think since then and over time.

[10:28] Travis: Yes. Having this ability to use AI and how much it has changed how top pros focus on their game prep is mostly through AI. If you look at Shin Jin-seo and things like this,

[10:40] Travis: that makes a lot of sense. But I don't again get that sense. You can listen again to the interview with Professor Marius Lindauer. He talks about at least how his feelings were around that.

[10:52] Travis: Then they talk a little bit further about AlphaZero.

AlphaZero and AI Beyond Go

[10:56] Travis: And AlphaZero is supposed to be special because whereas AlphaGo was leveraging human games and a large library of human games, AlphaZero was actually just learning against itself and actually playing much, much better than AlphaGo.

[11:12] Travis: And again, just tying back to the fact that those might be the best moves. And you know, seeing the quote unquote blue move when we're all playing our games online or wherever is great and all, but I still think there's just this huge gap where the blue move is the best move maybe ever.

[11:36] Travis: Or it also is according to this superhuman system that can do an insane level of calculations that we cannot as humans. So there's gotta be a way to eventually get to a point where we can see moves that would be almost the blue move, right?

[11:52] Travis: Maybe 0. 1 or 02 or 03 points off from the best move.

[11:58] Travis: But they make sense from a human perspective. They fit a style or they fit a logic or a rule of thumb because I know we love our Go proverbs in this game.

[12:11] Travis: They then talk about AlphaGo being this sort of pivotal moment in the development of AI also meant that when they finished the AlphaGo matches and AlphaGo had the resounding win over Lee Sedol, that this could lead to really key things like protein folding and I guess it ties back to the use of combinatorial mathematics and its capabilities there.

[12:35] Travis: So it's really cool to see that it did lead to something very positive with the protein folding and I believe that led to a Nobel Prize as well for Demis Hassabis.

[12:47] Travis: So that is.

[12:49] Travis: It's great to see a real world human benefit, right? This can lead to better drugs, better medication for people to save lives.

[12:58] Travis: So that's really great than it just being sort of an intellectual exercise.

Episode Sponsors

[13:05] Travis: This episode is sponsored by Baduk Pop, the app that makes learning Go fun and accessible with interactive puzzles, bite sized lessons and an AI tutor to guide you step by step.

[13:15] Travis: It's perfect for players on the move.

[13:18] Travis: You can download it or learn more at BadukPop.com that's b a d u k p o p dot com this episode is also sponsored by SmartGo One, the all in one Go toolkit for Apple devices.

[13:31] Travis: Replay professional games, solve problems, and keep your SGF collection organized all in one elegant app.

[13:38] Travis: Check it out at SmartGo.com or wherever you go to get your apps.

[13:44] Travis: So that's the podcast.

Peter Doggers on Deep Blue and AlphaGo

[13:46] Travis: The next thing I want to talk about now is my interview with Peter Doggers in episode two of season four.

[13:53] Travis: If you have not listened to it, go ahead and listen to it.

[13:57] Travis: Peter was really interesting because he was actually there when Garry Kasparov played Deep Blue and eventually lost the overall set of matches. And the contrasts,

[14:11] Travis: he said, were pretty striking between Deep Blue and AlphaGo matches.

[14:16] Travis: And it's funny he said that when you were in watching the Deep Blue games with Garry Kasparov,

[14:25] Travis: it really felt like they were playing very similar levels of chess. Like there wasn't a dramatic difference in the AlphaGo matches. There appeared to be quite a dramatic difference.

[14:36] Travis: And then the other thing was that with Deep Blue,

[14:39] Travis: there was a point at which Kasparov thought that there was a move that was played that seemed superhuman.

[14:47] Travis: And he in the press conferences afterwards, Peter Doggers actually got to ask him about that game and what was going on. And Kasparov wanted to see the calculation logs from the IBM Deep Blue team, but they wouldn't share it.

[15:04] Travis: And Kasparov thought that maybe one of the grandmasters that was working on the Deep Blue project might have tweaked the calculations or something, or overrode them perhaps, so that it would play that move.

[15:19] Travis: And I guess from that point on,

[15:20] Travis: it really got into Kasparov's head and that really affected him. And then, like, the last game was sort of like this anticlimactic dud. He played this risky move earlier on that didn't pay off.

[15:32] Travis: And so then Deep Blue won.

[15:35] Travis: So very different from what we saw with AlphaGo, where most of the games, AlphaGo appeared to be just crushing Lee Sedol, except for the one game that Lee Sedol won,

[15:47] Travis: and then the rest is kind of history.

[15:50] Travis: Peter also spoke about how the etiquette was very, very different. I think I haven't seen the press conferences for Kasparov and Deep Blue, but apparently they were a bit more heated and a bit more intense.

[16:03] Travis: And he said he was just so surprised by how Lee Sedol was so sort of respectful and sort of quiet and very,

[16:12] Travis: I would say, meek, almost. Right. I mean, you could see how deflated Lee Sedol was after he started losing these games. Because going into it,

[16:22] Travis: most people thought as well as Lee Sedol thought that it was going to be easy. It was not going to be that way.

[16:29] Travis: So, yeah, those are my points that I really want to touch on with AlphaGo and connect it back to those different things. To continue on my interview from the Peter Doggers interview,

[16:41] Travis: I just wanted to give a little bit of a background to that conversation and where my head was at.

What Chess Can Teach the Go Community

[16:47] Travis: So I connected up with Peter Doggers after somebody on the R Chess subreddit gave me the idea because what I was trying to do is understand,

[16:58] Travis: okay,

[16:59] Travis: I was thinking in the last season,

[17:01] Travis: it'd be really great to get a conversation of key stakeholders in the game of Go in the Western world to just talk about, like, what are some different ways to increase visibility for the game.

[17:12] Travis: This has obviously been a very common question,

[17:16] Travis: I think, in most parts of the Western Go world.

[17:20] Travis: And of course I'm just as interested. So there was some reaching out that I did to different stakeholders that I've connected with and done interviews with previously for the show.

[17:31] Travis: Some people I was able to connect with, some I wasn't able to connect with.

[17:35] Travis: It ended up being something where people.

[17:40] Travis: Some people seemed a little bit hesitant to do that conversation,

[17:43] Travis: probably because it felt like there was not a lot of upside, maybe only downside.

[17:48] Travis: I was hoping to just create a sort of roundtable discussion where it could just be talking about like, hey, what have we tried, what has worked,

[17:57] Travis: what hasn't worked and what else can be tried at the organizational level at, you know, with an online content creators, all that sort of stuff. So that is what led to me then saying, okay, well wait a second,

[18:10] Travis: why don't we try to ask people that are outside of the world of Go?

[18:15] Travis: Chess, of course, is a very different game, has a very different history than Go does, but it is a board game and it has gained a significant amount of popularity, particularly in the recent years.

[18:28] Travis: And that's what led me to ask the chess world. And then somebody said, hey, by the way, you should talk to Peter Doggers. He just, he wrote the chess revolution back in 2024 and it really catalogs the history of Go,

[18:41] Travis: both sort of pre modern times and then today, and then what Peter considered to be some of the key events of both Chess.com becoming what it became,

[18:55] Travis: social media,

[18:57] Travis: online content creation, all these sorts of things.

[19:00] Travis: One thing he said is that in terms of improving the visibility and access to the game, he was just actually kind of a good guinea pig. So what was great is that in preparation for the interview, as you will hear in the interview,

[19:14] Travis: he went and watched AlphaGo. He went and tried to watch some beginner YouTube videos on how to play.

[19:20] Travis: And he was saying that, yeah, just the 19×19 board, as for many newcomers, is just overwhelming and you can't have any sense for what's going on. And so he was suggesting maybe just do a lot of things with smaller boards to begin with,

[19:35] Travis: use a 9×9 board.

[19:36] Travis: And I know that for teachers of this game, there's been a lot of conversation about exactly what you start with.

[19:44] Travis: It's to me the 9×9 board, of course it makes sense, it's a smaller board, you can understand that better.

[19:51] Travis: But the challenge that I think a lot of us recognize, and I recognize even at my level, is that it's so constrained in, in a way that board being so small, you hit up against a corner or a wall very quickly and it could start to force you to have to address more complicated concepts in go.

[20:11] Travis: Like making life,

[20:14] Travis: having eyes.

[20:15] Travis: What's a false eye? seki. Right? These things-ko-those are much more complicated concepts than just simple capture Go. So I see where he was going with it. He was just thinking like take something smaller,

[20:29] Travis: use that first and then go with the bigger boards. But you have to do something to get people in and draw them in.

[20:38] Travis: My thought was always around Doing something with, like,

[20:43] Travis: almost like Sudoku puzzles.

[20:45] Travis: And what if you just did,

[20:47] Travis: like, tsumego problems? Make those something that's popular, right? So maybe you could sell books of tsumego problems that could be fun for just normal people and say, hey, here are the basic rules.

[20:58] Travis: As I even say that the problem is, of course, that, again,

[21:01] Travis: it is focusing on more complicated concepts.

[21:05] Travis: So that might not be the best thing. I don't know. Maybe some of the tsumego could just be very simple capture problems.

[21:11] Travis: But I'd be curious to see what other people think about that.

[21:16] Travis: So going into this conversation, this interview with Peter Doggers, I read the book.

[21:21] Travis: It's a great book. Does a really nice job.

[21:24] Travis: I found myself getting into this challenge, though, as I was going through the interview with Peter, where I didn't want to just have everything be like, okay, well, in chess, this happened.

[21:36] Travis: What do you suggest for another game? What do you suggest for another game? Right. I just felt like that was going to become redundant and just not very useful pretty quickly.

[21:46] Travis: So I did ask those questions. Some of that I did cut out because I just felt like it wasn't terribly valuable. There were also some parts that I didn't include where Peter was just asking more about the game and how much Go is online and in what way.

[22:03] Travis: And so I think there was some education there because he didn't know about the game. But I realized going through the interview that I really just needed to say, okay, we're going to just look at chess as that board game, see what key facts or insights can be distilled from it.

[22:22] Travis: Anything from looking at Bobby Fischer. Right. And how he came up and he got really big to these other things, and we'll draw what conclusions we can,

[22:36] Travis: but it was still a really great conversation. And I do feel like there's this inextricable link in the west with Go and chess. That's just gonna be there.

[22:44] Travis: All right, so that is some thoughts on the Peter Doggers interview.

[22:52] Travis: I definitely recommend the book. It's just a really fun book.

[22:55] Travis: So check that out.

[22:57] Travis: I also read the book on Bobby Fischer quite a while ago.

[23:02] Travis: It was sort of a biography on him. So check that out.

[23:05] Travis: If you haven't read it, it's very good. It also gets a little bit more into the effects of the sort of east west rivalry for the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

[23:18] Travis: And that really became a big part of the story for Bobby Fischer.

[23:24] Travis: He also felt like he was really underpaid. It's interesting, even though he became super famous with chess leading into the World championship matches and those things, he felt like he was being not paid enough constantly.

[23:37] Travis: Now, I know there was likely some mental health challenges that kind of came along the way with Bobby Fischer,

[23:42] Travis: but that is interesting.

[23:45] Travis: The other thing that I notice is maybe there's some way that, you know, some of the political negativity out there around sort of the rivalry between America and China,

[23:58] Travis: maybe that could be used for some sort of positive connecting between the countries around this game. Right. And China, and can be sort of a, you know, almost like an ambassador of this game.

[24:12] Travis: But perhaps that's wishful thinking. I don't know.

[24:15] Travis: Okay,

Go-Inspired Technology and Variants

[24:16] Travis: let's move on a little bit to a couple interesting posts that were on the r/baduk subreddit.

[24:24] Travis: One was a short 2 minute video on the story of the QR code. And I think a lot of us know about how that was created by Masahiro Hara. And then he connected with a guy named Takayuki Nagaya to then create the QR code because the simple barcode just wasn't containing enough information.

[24:46] Travis: And Masahiro, at lunchtime, he would play Go for Fun. And he kind of used that as inspiration.

[24:55] Travis: So some things I thought were really cute and fun about that video is that it said that the gentleman that helped with it, Takayuki,

[25:05] Travis: used it as motivation so that once they got that project done, he would finally marry his girlfriend. Very sweet.

[25:13] Travis: The other thing was that they set up the QR code so that even if up to 30% of the code was visibly damaged,

[25:22] Travis: they wanted it so that it would still work.

[25:24] Travis: And so they talk about having these three corners of every QR code there and having certain pattern alignments to make that all happen.

[25:34] Travis: Really fascinating.

[25:35] Travis: And they set it up so that the system would recognize whatever information or decode whatever,

[25:42] Travis: whatever information it needed so quickly.

[25:45] Travis: That QR code stands for quick response code. I did not know that. So very cool.

[25:50] Travis: And then finally, they didn't try to get a patent on it. They didn't do any licensing on it. So it quickly became used everywhere. I feel like it got particularly popular.

[26:03] Travis: It was popular before the pandemic. But I remember during the pandemic, at least in the United States,

[26:09] Travis: if you eventually started going to restaurants,

[26:12] Travis: every restaurant now,

[26:14] Travis: instead of having a physical menu, obviously you didn't want to get Covid touch menus with your hands, germs, stuff like that. They wouldn't offer a menu. They would just have a QR code on the table.

[26:27] Travis: You'd take out your phone, take a picture of it,

[26:30] Travis: then you would get your menu. So ironically, I don't remember going to many restaurants of course during the pandemic and then it was only like kind of after the pandemic was over that I was looking around saying like, oh my gosh, like there,

[26:43] Travis: there are still so many QR codes.

[26:46] Travis: The next post that was really interesting was one about a app or website that someone created called Kaya after Kaya wood, which is a very high quality wood used for making Go boards.

[27:01] Travis: And it's a nice version of the Kifu Snap. If you've ever used that online where you have a board state and you want to quickly determine what's happening on the board,

[27:13] Travis: this is just a nice new setup that gives you the ability to quickly look at a live in person game and make sense of it.

[27:25] Travis: So I thought it was really well set up,

[27:29] Travis: really nicely laid out.

[27:31] Travis: You just go to Kaya Go app and there it is.

[27:36] Travis: And so you have a board you know immediately.

[27:39] Travis: But it's a very nice layout and yeah, I'm gonna try to use this at some point.

[27:45] Travis: So it's,

[27:48] Travis: it's funny now like I feel like because a lot of Go players have this like coding background, I feel like there's just a lot of these really great one off sites that people have put a lot of energy into and they look really great, like very functional.

[28:02] Travis: So brief shout out on that.

[28:06] Travis: What else happened this week I know tied back into the AlphaGo anniversary. I know Lee Sedol did a big event with AlphaGo again where they did I think kind of some sort of like live real time like coding or something with AI during the match.

[28:30] Travis: So I didn't read about it a whole lot.

[28:33] Travis: So it looks like they he Lee Sedol played against an agentic AI where they created a Go game model together.

[28:44] Travis: So yeah, I guess the intent was to just show how AI can really function as a collaborator as opposed to an opponent.

[28:54] Travis: I'm not sure how popular it was, but that came up as well. So another AlphaGo 10 year anniversary thing and then the final one or the second from final one.

[29:06] Travis: Another interesting post about Go variants and this one's called Go Asylum.

[29:14] Travis: The web URL is a little bit longer to say altogether, but I'll try to include it in the episode notes. But again, really nice layout and it has all these different Go variants.

[29:26] Travis: It looks like it's in perhaps Chinese and English. You can click English and you can play stubborn stubborn Go or line Go. You could play one color go, you can play toroidal Go And I've honestly not played a lot of these, but really nice layout and it could be a fun little thing to do when you're having friends over and maybe they know nothing about Go or they know a lot about Go,

[29:53] Travis: you could play one of these variants.

[29:55] Travis: So I'm going to try to give it a shot. Go Asylum.

[29:59] Travis: And the last one that caught my eye for the week was more on the silly side, which is how would you make a drinking game out of the game of Go?

[30:10] Travis: And it was pretty funny. Some people had some good ideas.

[30:14] Travis: Tuerda, who we've had on the show, really great conversation with him, he said that you could do drinking for each capture, you could do drinking for each atari,

[30:23] Travis: drinking for every empty triangle, a whole bunch of stuff like that. The one I liked a lot was the one where response Hawk said that you could make it so that for every one stone that you capture,

[30:40] Travis: you have to drink a beer,

[30:42] Travis: one sip.

[30:43] Travis: For every three stones you capture, you have to drink a sip of whiskey. And then for every 10 stones, a tequila shot. That would make games where there are just dramatic battles where somebody's trying to just kill a dragon.

[30:58] Travis: Epic.

[31:00] Travis: So yeah, that's interesting.

[31:04] Travis: And then somebody here said that they organized a beer Go tournament once and that people were free to play splits against each other and the winner had eight wins and had consumed 12 beers.

[31:17] Travis: So pretty interesting and fun. I don't know about all of you, but it feels like,

[31:25] Travis: don't get me wrong, like I have a drink, you know, every now and then,

[31:29] Travis: but it seems like alcohol, they're just finding more and more from a medical perspective, it's just not,

[31:36] Travis: not terribly good for you.

[31:38] Travis: So I Wonder if maybe 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now it'll be considered almost like the cigarettes of today,

[31:47] Travis: right? And we'll be telling our kids or grandkids, oh yeah, we used to drink alcohol like pretty regularly. But anyways,

[31:55] Travis: that was a fun post.

[31:58] Travis: Okay, moving on.

Andrii Kravets and the Gap with Asian Professionals

[32:00] Travis: Some other things that came up online. One was an interview that I believe the European Go Federation did with the new European professional champion, Andrii Kravets, who's a 3 dan professional.

[32:15] Travis: And they had an interview with him about that set of games, how it went.

[32:24] Travis: Sounds like he played very strongly and he felt like he was always in a really good position.

[32:28] Travis: And then he had one game that he didn't even really need to win,

[32:31] Travis: but he just wanted to play well.

[32:33] Travis: They then asked him about going to China to play the Chinese C League team tournament.

[32:41] Travis: And they were asking him like, hey, do you feel like you've become stronger since the last time you played there? And do you feel like you can beat some Asian pros?

[32:49] Travis: Because as we know, there's a gap in ability, generally speaking.

[32:55] Travis: And he said, unfortunately, he can't go just because flight prices went through the roof with the whole Iran conflict,

[33:06] Travis: which makes sense. But he then talks about the Asian pros, and he says, when I was playing on the second board two years ago in the Chinese C League, I felt like I was close and only needed to make one small step to catch them.

[33:24] Travis: Last year I played on the first board and many of my opponents were in the top 300 in the world.

[33:29] Travis: So these are good players.

[33:31] Travis: It felt like even when I played my best games, it still wasn't enough.

[33:36] Travis: And I lost by anywhere from half a point to three and a half points. I've definitely become stronger in the last year, but I'm still not sure if it's enough yet to compete with these players.

[33:47] Travis: So,

[33:49] Travis: yeah, very interesting.

[33:50] Travis: An interesting insight given. Andrii is again winning the European Championship. And from a point perspective, it sounds so close. I mean, if you're only half a point to three and a half points.

[34:02] Travis: But then again, I know that at that level,

[34:05] Travis: everybody is counting very carefully.

[34:07] Travis: So,

[34:08] Travis: you know, I don't know if it's one of those things, whether you're winning by an inch or a mile.

[34:12] Travis: He just still feels like there's a big gap. But, hey,

[34:16] Travis: you gotta keep trying, right?

[34:19] Travis: The Western world needs to keep trying.

A Teaching Game with Anders Kierulf

[34:22] Travis: Now I want to talk about my Go playing moment of the week.

[34:26] Travis: I was playing a correspondence game online with the creator of SmartGo, Anders Kierulf,

[34:33] Travis: and he was nice enough to offer some teaching games. So we've been playing and we played an even game because I do want to just learn.

[34:43] Travis: Not really for the sake of playing the whole game out, but just his ways of thinking. He's been really generous with just sharing that. And we were playing a game we play up until about move 31.

[34:56] Travis: It's been not a terribly chaotic game.

[35:00] Travis: I'm of course playing black.

[35:02] Travis: I have two to three corners sort of generally secured. I played three, four points, so those corners are pretty much mine.

[35:12] Travis: But then I have a relatively weak group that's in the top middle of the board,

[35:18] Travis: but there's still plenty of open space in the bottom right quadrant of the board.

[35:23] Travis: And it's white's turn.

[35:28] Travis: I have a three, four and a five, three,

[35:32] Travis: you know, just enclosure. In the bottom right corner is black and it's white's turn.

[35:37] Travis: White goes ahead for move 32 and just plays right at the spot in the bottom right corner of the board where you would create almost like, I think they call it a dog's head is the term I think translated from Japanese or Chinese or something.

[35:53] Travis: It's like they played the move where between my two black stones and theirs, it creates like that little like kind of almost like a triangular shape. Right. But a dog's head is, is a good shape.

[36:06] Travis: Right. There's also the horse head where it's what, one more space.

[36:10] Travis: And I have to admit, like when White played that move,

[36:14] Travis: it just like I was so confused. I was like, what is he messing with me? Like what does this move mean? And I actually, I didn't ask him in all of our chat back and forth about it, but it totally felt like he was sort of Hikaru no going me like he was playing a move like in the beginning of the show where Akira is playing Hikaru for the first time and Hikaru has like Sai,

[36:43] Travis: the spirit of Sai for the first time in a game and just completely plays this random move in the. In the middle of the board and Akira is just like totally thrown by it.

[36:56] Travis: So yeah, so that was an interesting moment,

[37:00] Travis: but no very helpful game. So thought I would share that.

Remembering Richard Bozulich

[37:04] Travis: Couple other announcements.

[37:07] Travis: Richard Bozulich,

[37:09] Travis: which I apologize if I am mispronouncing,

[37:12] Travis: passed away earlier this month.

[37:15] Travis: And I know of Richard through some great books that he's written and published,

[37:24] Travis: but I just wanted to take a minute to kind of walk through. It looks like he passed away on March 9 and he was around 90 years of age, so it's great to hear.

[37:33] Travis: He lived a nice long life.

[37:35] Travis: And like me, if you learned Go in English, there's probably a pretty good chance that you were somehow influenced by him. He was an American author and he was also a publisher and he moved to Japan in the 1960s and really has been had been focusing on making Go accessible to the west for most of his life.

[37:56] Travis: He created, I looked this up online. He co founded the Ishi Press in 1967 and then later he founded Kiseido Publishing, through which he would write, Translate, publish more than 100 Go books, which is insane.

[38:11] Travis: And that's going to include a lot of the classics that I think a lot of us know, like the elementary Go series and many influential Opening and joseki books.

[38:22] Travis: He also created and published Go World magazine, which I never read myself, but that ran for 129 issues.

[38:30] Travis: And he was also for many years, I guess the main kind of conduit through which English speaking players were able to connect and look at top professional games and deep analysis from Japan.

[38:45] Travis: So it's funny how now,

[38:48] Travis: you know, we have online and we can use AI to translate things from Japanese and these other languages, but I can't imagine how much more, you know,

[38:58] Travis: difficult it was to get any access to, to those things in Japan.

[39:03] Travis: So it sounds like Richard was just a really key factor there.

[39:07] Travis: And yeah, apparently he wrote a lot of essays on things that would kind of be AI influenced around Fuseki and openings and visualization and the philosophy of the game which as for anybody who's listened to the show, I'm a sucker for connecting go to philosophy as a religious studies major in college myself.

[39:32] Travis: So yeah,

[39:33] Travis: so that's really sad to hear. I would have loved an opportunity to interview him. I know there were a few interviews recently in the last couple years on him,

[39:42] Travis: but sounded like just a great, great person for the game. So rest in peace, Richard.

Bushido: A Go-Centered Samurai Film

[39:49] Travis: Now to the thing that my wife is gonna get brownie points for.

[39:54] Travis: And I told her so, which is that she is an avid reader of the New York Times.

[40:00] Travis: And she we were sitting on the couch taking a break today because we had kind of just social events for our two sons. We had like a birthday party and then we had some family over and so we were getting a break because one was napping and the other one was out of the house with the grandparents.

[40:17] Travis: And she's on her phone, of course I'm on my phone. And she is like, oh,

[40:23] Travis: I'm going to send this link to you. It's a movie review about a movie called Bushido that's B u s h I D o.

[40:33] Travis: It's a Japanese movie and sure enough, it is about a sort of wandering samurai in the 1800s or the 18th century,

[40:46] Travis: one of those centuries.

[40:48] Travis: And the main focus of the game, everyone, is Go,

[40:53] Travis: which is awesome. I'm super excited for this.

[40:58] Travis: And here's a little bit of the description from the New York Times article,

[41:02] Travis: Little Blood Spills in Bushido,

[41:05] Travis: an engagingly slow boiling Japanese drama about a destitute ronin or vagrant samurai that subtly interrogates the way of the warrior.

[41:15] Travis: Among the movie's surprises is that many of its most intense scenes take place on that battle found on that battleground. Excuse me,

[41:23] Travis: known as Go, the ancient board game. Here in strategic move after move, tense game after game with unwavering focus, beads of sweat and small black and white stones.

[41:34] Travis: Combatants take territory, capture pieces and reveal truths about Their inner selves,

[41:40] Travis: their values, virtues and flaws.

[41:43] Travis: So yeah, it sounds awesome. I watched the trailer. I'll put the trailer in the episode notes as well.

[41:50] Travis: It sounds really cool.

[41:52] Travis: And I also love this review.

[41:55] Travis: Kind of again critiques the director.

[42:00] Travis: I don't know if I'm pronouncing correct. Kazuya Shiraishi.

[42:04] Travis: I might not be pronouncing that right. I apologize. But the reviewer says here that the director takes a few beats to get his filmmaking bearings. The early scenes are marred by some overly self conscious painterly compositions,

[42:19] Travis: but he finds them once the players start playing.

[42:22] Travis: Using a dynamic mix of angles as well as close ups and more contextualizing views, the filmmaker discreetly ratchets up the tension, making the board come alive. Sounds really cool.

[42:35] Travis: At one point,

[42:36] Travis: when one of the character takes his turn, the filmmaker cuts to the ronin's delicate hand cutting through the air with fingers straight as an arrow.

[42:45] Travis: A movement the camera mirrors.

[42:48] Travis: Sounds a lot like the moves that the Go players playing Hikaru no Go, where they like dramaticize somebody putting a stone on the board and it's like,

[42:58] Travis: right? And it's like showing everything like super dramatic and then placing the stone and then the light just is emanating off the stone, which I think is so cool.

[43:09] Travis: But I think a lot of us think that.

[43:11] Travis: So it sounds very exciting.

[43:14] Travis: Now to the question of when can we watch said movie?

[43:18] Travis: It looks like where I am in the US it is available for pre order now. I already placed a pre order for it. It was 12 bucks.

[43:27] Travis: If you have Apple or Apple TV or use the Apple ecosystem, it'll be available on May 22nd.

[43:34] Travis: So I'm very excited.

[43:36] Travis: I also looked up online that it's available through something called Fandango at home. My understanding of Fandango, at least in the US is that it was a website for getting tickets to go to movie theaters.

[43:47] Travis: But I guess this is another app where you can watch streaming movies and shows and things. So if you are elsewhere in the world, look it up, see if you can access it, see if it's being distributed in your country.

[43:58] Travis: But sounds like a lot of fun.

[44:01] Travis: So I love me anything that connects,

[44:05] Travis: go with samurais. And just the coolness of all of that. I love that that's what.

[44:10] Travis: That's a big part of what got me into the game.

Fan Hui on the Psychological Impact of AlphaGo

[44:13] Travis: Okay, so I apologize because I actually do have one other thing about AlphaGo.

[44:18] Travis: I know I said I was done, but I'm not.

[44:21] Travis: It's going through some notes here. And this was also in the r/baduk subreddit as well. So this is sort of connected to everything we've talked about this episode, but it was the article that was written by Mabel Soule about some podcast episodes that Fan Hui, the European Go player in AlphaGo,

[44:47] Travis: was saying about AlphaGo and about AI and about the whole experience. It was really, really interesting.

[44:54] Travis: And for those who want sort of the Cliff Notes,

[45:00] Travis: you can see it in the subreddit. Somebody was nice enough to post it, but just some really interesting reactions around how dehumanizing losing to the original AlphaGo model was for Fan Hui and how it's like he felt like he had just like forgot how to play Go once.

[45:21] Travis: He had no edge or advantage for some of the little tricks that he found or some of the quirks he found in the system for AlphaGo before he was ready to play Lee Sedol,

[45:34] Travis: he said it just got to a point where it was like nothing worked right. Like everything, even games where he felt like he was ahead. He wasn't actually ahead, he was losing from the beginning.

[45:43] Travis: So it just sounded completely demoralizing.

[45:47] Travis: And it was so interesting how he said that. Yeah, even if he had a human just playing those moves out against him as the computer, it would have been better than nothing because again, it's just like they.

[45:57] Travis: The computer is not going to react to anything, right? Whether doesn't care if you feel humiliated, doesn't care any of that. And so it just shows you how much we are built to have a human to play against.

[46:10] Travis: Fan Hui did say that originally he thought it was a scam or a fraud when he got the email from DeepMind to play the games.

[46:19] Travis: And then it sounds like he got a little bit of backlash for maybe almost like being on the side of the enemy or something when he started trying to kind of help out DeepMind with this whole system,

[46:34] Travis: which seems unfair. Like, you know, if this is something that's coming anyways,

[46:39] Travis: I get why you would want to just help. Help. In any case,

[46:44] Travis: the best quote, and I'm sure of course it was translated because this was in Chinese, these original podcast and this was turned into English,

[46:53] Travis: is it said that Fan hui said that AlphaGo effectively turned all of the professional Go players up to that point into a bunch of elementary school students like Reg, it just, it just made it all of a sudden like all of that knowledge and all of that time to learn the game and become the best at the game kind of was just almost out the window because now AlphaGo could just figure it out,

[47:20] Travis: which is just gotta be crushing I think if you're making your living doing this game at that time. Right. Ten years ago, and this happens, it's gotta be just really brutal.

[47:32] Travis: I know that Lee Sedol's attitude was very much that. Right. Just feeling crushed about it and.

[47:42] Travis: Yeah,

[47:42] Travis: it's just incredible.

[47:45] Travis: Yeah. The lines from the podcast about how having knowledge as a human was almost what limited us in playing against AlphaGo. And this term, I guess it's a term in Chinese, sort of prison of knowledge.

[48:00] Travis: And it almost makes me think of like that phrase we say in English, which is like the more you know, the more you know that you don't know anything at all.

[48:08] Travis: I mean, it's not exactly the same, obviously, but it's like the very thing that gives you the ability to be so good at something can also be the thing that limits you.

[48:17] Travis: Um, it's like that whole kind of paradox of like, if you become so expert at something and you have a knowledge set and a mental model for all those things,

[48:26] Travis: but then something comes along that's superhuman and beats you or bests you,

[48:31] Travis: you start to question your intuition, but you're like the best that there is. Right. So it's just this very vicious cycle,

[48:39] Travis: it sounds like.

[48:41] Travis: Yeah, I'm really appreciative of Mabel Soule posting this on X.

[48:49] Travis: This translation,

[48:51] Travis: or a sort of translation slash amalgamation. Really, really cool to see and get kind of the inside scoop from Fan Hui.

Supporting English-Language Go Content

[49:00] Travis: Yeah. And then the last thing I wanted to end the episode on was just something random. I was kind of going back and forth about whether I wanted to talk about it.

[49:10] Travis: And I'm not trying to make this a thing at all, but I still want to bring it up because I think it's. It's worthwhile, which is that I was looking on the.

[49:21] Travis: One of the Discord servers and I saw that Octo from Dan and the Kyu.

[49:30] Travis: The podcast had been asked about if he was going to make any more episodes and he effectively said, hey, I actually decided to stop it being, you know,

[49:43] Travis: and that really the main reason is that the feedback was non existent generally or just kind of weird or slightly negative and a lot of complaining and things like this.

[49:55] Travis: So he stopped, which I could certainly understand. If you're not getting a lot of feedback or getting kind of not positive feedback.

[50:02] Travis: Yeah, that, that would do it.

[50:05] Travis: But yeah, I just,

[50:09] Travis: I think that in the English speaking world,

[50:12] Travis: again, I think you all know, or some of, you know, like, the reason I got into doing this is because there's just not much out there. I mean,

[50:21] Travis: I wanted Something in a very specific audio format. Right. I.

[50:25] Travis: My place in life, I'm going around, I'm driving to places, I'm walking to places. I want an audio only format for the game of Go in English.

[50:34] Travis: And when I started this there was very little out there, I mean almost nothing.

[50:40] Travis: And so my reaction is like, hey,

[50:44] Travis: I hear,

[50:45] Travis: I totally hear where Octo is coming from. But you know, Octo, if you're listening and I know I shot you a message like we would greatly benefit from, you know.

[50:54] Travis: Yeah, just your thoughts and insights and discussions about the game of Go. And I think any content in this format in English about Go is good content, you know. So that's.

[51:09] Travis: Yeah,

[51:10] Travis: that's all I wanted to say. I just think it's like the more we can get others to want to do content creation and these sorts of things, I think it all just can.

[51:20] Travis: Yeah. Increase visibility for the game, hopefully in a good way.

[51:24] Travis: And get more like minded people to just appreciate how amazing this game is and it connects us too. Right? It's like I can't believe when I think about the people with whom I've spoken and interviewed for the show or asked for help.

[51:41] Travis: It's like people have been so generous about it. And also it's just been really nice. I did not expect to make kind of, you know, light connections with sort of the, the general Go community through these people and it's been really nice.

[51:56] Travis: I'm actually really excited to meet some of some of the interviewees at the Go Congress this year in Boston. So I'm really excited about that. I wish I could go to the European Go Congress, but I don't think that's going to happen this year.

[52:11] Travis: So that is all we got today. So I hope you enjoyed and I'll catch you next week.

[52:17] Travis: Thanks so much.

Closing Sponsors

[52:33] Travis: On a final note, I just want to thank again our sponsors for the episode. SmartGo One is your all in one Go toolkit for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Whether you're replaying games, solving problems or managing your SGF files,

[52:47] Travis: it includes a massive professional game library, a strong KataGo engine and polished recording tools so you can study master games,

[52:54] Travis: play the AI and cleanly record your own over the board games all in one place.

[53:00] Travis: Our other sponsor is Baduk Pop, which is an app that makes Go simple and fun to learn with interactive puzzles, short lessons and an AI tutor that helps you improve wherever you are.

[53:10] Travis: It also gives you daily ranked problems that adjust to your level.

[53:14] Travis: Themed sets like life and death and tesuji plus AI and online play so you can practice and then test what you've learned. You can check it out at BadukPop.com that's b a d u k p o p dot com.