It will be an awful long time before coders come close to cracking Go

Go is an ancient contest of meditative strategy, but in the present day another deeper meta-game of cracking its mastery with algorithms is going on. Yet the way the mind of a Go player works continues to elude programmers. Computers are no match.

Wired has a pretty fascinating feature on the subject of how code just can’t grasp Go. Says one cognitive scientist and complex systems theorist who studied the pros:

The result was totally unexpected. Moves became steadily more predictable until players reached near-professional level. But at that point, moves started getting less predictable, and we don’t know why. Our best guess is that information from the rest of the board started influencing decision-making in a unique way.

In other words, a scientific shoulder shrug. If you’re as fascinated by the limits of computation as I am, you should definitely go read more.