Why Did People Think AI Would Never Solve Go?

Jason Ma thinks people, before AlphaGo, treated Go as one of the games that AI would never solve, because the search space is larger than the total number of atoms in the world. Reinforcement learning cracked it anyway, and that is how he got into AI.

He spent time in Japan and China as a kid and grew up playing Go. AlphaGo came out when he was a senior in high school. He had played for many years and was mind blown that a game he found so complicated fell to reinforcement learning. He wanted models, systems, and agents that can self-improve. At Penn as a PhD student he worked on reinforcement learning, co-advised by advisors who were both interested in it. One advisor focused more on robotics and had done a postdoc at Berkeley Robotics Lab, which is how he got into robots at Penn. He thinks Grasp is one of the best places to do robotics, and the PhD became reinforcement learning for robotics.