Like if you picked some familiar tropes and asked an AI to write a screenplay.
- Weary master who’s really, really good at something.
- Master is aloof, introverted, irascible. Nobody’s interesting enough.
- Enter precocious, young, raw apprentice. They meet by random chance.
- Cue training montage.
- Apprentice surpasses Master.
- Master deals with the defeat/affront poorly. Substance abuse is triggered. May be brief but must be intense.
- Reconciliation and Wisdom. May occur at Master’s deathbed.
These are all covered in this movie, which is about a Go master and his genius pupil. Based on real-life pair Cho Hun-Hyun and Lee Chang-ho. I know absolutely nothing about the game so thoroughly enjoyed the “Hmmm, his opening gambit is unconventional and rabbit-like” dialogue. In the movie, players in Go world append rank to others’ names. Not sure if that’s the case in real life.
Browsing Wikipedia led me to these quotes by world champion Lee Sedol who turned pro at age 12 (!) and retired after he felt his “world collapsing” due to AI:
Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.
“I faced the issues of A.I. early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”
“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.”
Indeed.
He famously played AlphaGo and was defeated 4-1. Here’s the whole documentary. I liked it better than this movie and you may, too.