Why Did a Second Agent Make Go Endless?

David Silver says a game of Go with one agent is the most boring game you could imagine, and a second agent turns the board into emergent complexity with an endless learning curve. One agent only places stones until the grid is full, and there is no strategy whatsoever. The moment a second agent enters, one agent has to reason about all the possible behaviors of the other, and the complexity of the environment rises sharply.

Go is a 19 by 19 grid where the aim is to maximize territory. David Silver says that, to the best of their knowledge, the compute they sank into Go while they were working on it still left an endless learning curve. They could continue to discover new things in the game without end. He says Go is not an end point. The game remains a board game and quite narrow. Even so, very simple environment dynamics lead to an infinite onion of layers of complexity that never stops, infinite only to the capacity of what computers can do.