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Also, if I have counted correctly, Ke Jie played KataGo's top choice 29 times out of 60 moves
I have been working on a book "The First Teenage Meijin" which has just gone off for proof-reading. I was stimulated to do this for various reasons, but one was that the Japanese commentators have started seasoning their with AI data, and I have a long-standing interest in trends in go journalism.
Although the five games of the last Meijin match were all covered with that added spice, it was a very modest amount, and so I decided to go to town with Game 5 - partly because that was rated as a game of unusually high quality. I therefore checked every move with LeelaZero and Katago (LZ and KG do differ quite often, but do indeed seem to confirm the quality of the human play; all the results are in the book). But there are a couple of teasing insights.
Cho U had perfect match with a bot 79 times out of his 126 moves. He had a very close match, which may be interpreted as matching with the computers’ second or third choices, 18 times.
Shibano Toramaru had a perfect match 88 times out of his 126 moves, and very close match 12 times.
So both players were keeping in very close step with the bots for about 80% of the time. What is fascinating, though, is that both players seemed either to get an exact match or to go off the rails significantly. In other words there were rather few cases where they were choosing the second or third best move.
Furthermore, it seemed to me that, whenever the humans went astray, they usually did so for several moves at a time. It was as if they had lost the flow of the game. On top of that, Shibano mentioned “flow” several times in his own comments. The most significant was perhaps when he revealed that he studied by playing through new games quickly either to suss out new moves or to get a feel for the flow of the game.
Flow is not a new concept in go, but I have long felt that it has been underestimated.
Because of my interest in go journalism, I long ago noted that modern commentaries have in some cases become like bloatware. There is a lot to be said for the old style of commentary where very few comments are given, but those that do, adumbrate the flow of the game. My favourite has always been a Shusai commentary which was one number and one word in Japanese (128 yoshi - 128 was good). It was actually surprisingly helpful, simply because it marked a significant bend in the river.
Because of that experience, I learned to take special note of a failry common phrase in go texts, ichidanraku (an ordinary Japanese word rather than a technical term), which is used to mark a "pause" in the flow of the game. I introduced it (as "pause point") in the Go Wisdom indexes in
Genjo-Chitoku and
Games of Shuei because I thought it was very important. My encounters with Shibano's views on flow and AI have strengthened my feelings about this importance.
Just to prime readers' own thoughts about this concept, I believe that debates over whether bots or players agree or disagree on a particular can be misleading. It is very often more important to judge whether a player's (or a bot's) move
agree with each other. In other words, do they have a consistent
flow? Game 5 of the 44th Meijin illustrates that thinking nicely in Shibano's case, and may explain why he won - he said he started off feeling the flow of each game was awkward, but he finally got on top of it.