The milestone victory of AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence system developed by Google, in 2016 has spurred a Go renaissance that has led to human players becoming more creative in their game strategies, according to a recent study published in the journal PNAS. Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and Yale analyzed a dataset of over 5.8 million Go moves made during professional play between 1950 and 2021 with the help of a “superhuman” Go AI program that grades the quality of moves. They found that the quality of professional play improved relatively little before 2016, but since the rise of superhuman AIs in 2018, median decision quality index (DQI) values have changed at a rate above 0.7.
