Astral Codex Ten

Go

4 min read

Go

Article

Go is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 06, 2021 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Non-self-aware computers can beat humans at Chess, Go, and Starcraft”; “Let’s say you want to make an AI play Go”; “DeepMind got their Go AI AlphaZero to try learning chess”. It most often appears alongside DeepMind, Eliezer Yudkowsky, OpenAI.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: August 06, 2021
  • Last seen: June 27, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI
August 06, 2021 · Original source
But also, who cares? Non-self-aware computers can beat humans at Chess, Go, and Starcraft. They can write decent essays and paint good art. Whatever you’re expecting you “need self-awareness” in order to do, I bet non-self-aware computers can do it too. Computers are just going to get better and better at stuff, and at some point probably they’ll be as good as humans at various things, and if you ask them if they’re self-aware they’ll give some answer consistent with their programming, which for all I know is what we do too.
Let’s say you want to make an AI play Go. You design some AI that is very good at learning. Then you make it play Go against itself a zillion times and learn from its mistakes, until it has learned a really good strategy for playing Go.
But can the learning algorithm learn to play chess? Yes, extremely well. DeepMind got their Go AI AlphaZero to try learning chess, and it became world champion within a day. Then they asked it to learn a different game called shogi, and it became world champion of that one too. Could AlphaZero learn how to invent new rockets? No, because that’s not the class of problems it knows how to learn about (it’s not a board game where it can play against itself a bunch of times and observe its mistakes). So is the learning algorithm a narrow AI or a general AI? It’s not infinitely narrow - it can learn any board game you throw at it - but it’s not infinitely general either. Certainly it’s more general, smarter, and at least slightly scarier than a polynomial that predicts parole decisions.
Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
February 23, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It
April 11, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links For December 2022
December 28, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.