> It's past the event horizon for human understanding.

AlphaGo creators could "rewind" the whole program state to that move and inspect the tree search probabilities according to the board states it looks through to find a list of board states that generate a cumulative highest probability of wining by doing a move in that exact odd spot.

My guess would be that while humans tend to put stones with a single, double, or sometimes triple "reason", or in AI words, "high probability of local effectiveness in upcoming several turns", AlphaGo, with his ability to see further, can see past the local effectiveness into more global effectiveness and higher probability of winning further down the road.

In other words, those tenuki moves might actually be past the event horizon of human understanding, but only if inspected by looking at them and thinking ourselves. If we use AlphaGo itself, it should be possible to find out the reason for every single tenuki it will ever do.

> past the event horizon for human understanding

I think this phrase is going to pop up more and more frequently.

This thread is literally the only Google search result for this phrase (for me)...

I searched for it in incognito mode and saw the same. Pretty interesting; it's such a nice, catchy phrase.

"Outside the light cone" is more on point -- it's far enough away or moving fast enough that we'll never be able catch up.

To be fair, humans haven't had a lot of time to analyze AlphaGo's play. It's possible that we could understand these moves after some study.

"past event horizon for human understanding" I think you are too pessimistic and that "centaur Go" will evolve in the same way that "centaur chess" is, where a player (or team of players) with access to the software can outperform the stand-alone software. I guess my vote is for "intelligence augmentation" over AI, if only because opaque models/algorithms cannot benefit from human creativity.

Centaur chess players do not outperform the best chess engines. That is based on a misrepresentation of one of the first centaur chess tournaments. Human modified moves only reduce the strength of the best chess engines now. The benefit that was reported was one of tactics one centaur chess competitor had over other centaur chess competitors, not centaur chess vs stand alone chess engine.

It is a misunderstanding that has been breathlessly repeated by futurists and transhumanists for years.

And it's such a strange claim, you'd think it would be obvious that it makes no sense. Nobody would ever try to claim "I think that a team of a top pro and a mediocre amateur would be stronger than the top pro alone", but that's basically what they're doing with centaur chess.

Why do startups staffed by amateurs sometimes outperform teams of experts at established firms? Creativity and new perspectives can yield surprising results.