*I'm not buying the argument here, but I'm happy that the issue is being raised.
Help us art critics, metaphysicians, be honest, your time is at hand
(...)
Much has been written about the achievements of deep-learning systems that are now the best Go players in the world. AlphaGo and its variants have strong claims to having created a whole new way of playing the game. They have taught human experts that opening moves long thought to be ill-conceived can lead to victory. The program plays in a style that experts describe as strange and alien. “They’re how I imagine games from far in the future,” Shi Yue, a top Go player, said of AlphaGo’s play. The algorithm seems to be genuinely creative.
In some important sense it is. Game-playing, though, is different from composing music or writing a novel: in games there is an objective measure of success. We know we have something to learn from AlphaGo because we see it win.
But that is also what makes Go a “toy domain,” a simplified case that says only limited things about the world... (((etc etc)))
