The Day After Move 37

There’s a lot of posts out today about Move 37, and how it changed the world. This one is about how it changed me.

9/11 Moonlanding

I was a few months into 21 years old when a hijacked plane crashed into the first World Trade Center tower. I was commuting in to work listening to the radio (as was the style at the times). I couldn’t figure out how the heck a plane could hit the tower. Was the pilot drunk? How did he even get into the middle of New York City? I was imagining a Cessna because the idea of a passenger plane running into the building was actually unimaginable. I was barely starting to realize “Wait… are they talking about, like, a big commercial plane?” when the second plane hit. In that moment like a crystal suddenly forming I realized this was an attack, and there would be war. I knew my country well enough to know that there would be military action as a result. Maybe, maybe we could avoid war.

When I came in to work everyone was crowded around the small personal TV one of my coworkers had with him (live streaming wasn’t a thing yet). That was the first time I had a visual, saw the smoke coming out of the towers. There was grim chatter as we watched live footage. No one was working. The bosses were there with us. How would they get that blaze under control? How many people would die up there before then?

When the first tower began to fall the entire room gasped. We flinched away from the screen as a single body. Dead silence. Someone started crying. We had all watched the “Skyscraper Inferno!” movies. We thought that’s what this was. It had not even entered the realm of imagination that the entire tower would just go down, crushing everyone. This is what an update of sickening proportions feels like.¹ Now all eyes went to the second tower. Would this one stand? Suddenly the speed of evacuation was all that mattered.

What little chance for avoiding war had been left was now absolutely obliterated.

We were all excused from work early. Leaving the office, I entered a different world from the one I had woken up in. The repercussions of this day were staggering. No one knew how the world would be different. We didn’t even know what had happened yet. But the world would forever be divided into before this day and after this day. It is rare to have such sudden, sharp pivot points in history. A revolution in a single day. I watched it happen. We all watched it happen together.

I finally realized why my elders had such profound memories of watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. To me it was just another date in history. My entire life we’ve had men bopping around in space and American flags on the moon. It’s a background fact. For them, it was a single moment unprecedented in human history that marked a permanent, sweeping change. Which they all experienced collectively, as it happened.

AlphaGo

Computers had been beating humans at Chess since I was a teenager. It was an impressive engineering feat, but an understandable one. Chess was basically “solvable” in a mechanistic way using search-ahead algorithms. Those of us paying attention to AI in the mid-teens were paying attention to a program called “AlphaGo.” Run by Google DeepMind, it was supposedly a machine that could play Go very well. They wanted to demonstrate this by challenging the best Go players of the era.

This next part is written from memory, forgive me if individual details are off.

The thing about Go is that the space of potential moves explodes too quickly for a search algorithm to work. I’ve barely played Go myself, I don’t know much about it. But among humans it seems one has to have a mental representation of what the state of the board “means” and how a play can shift that. The game is widely accepted to require a fundamental intuitive grasp which humans develop over many years of intense play. There isn’t any way for a human to program that into a machine. So the AlphaGo team didn’t try. Instead they created a digital brain, where numbers took the place of neurons, that could “learn” by changing those numbers. They had AlphaGo play millions of games against itself, changing the numbers a little bit after every game in response to how well the game went, “learning” to play as it went. There isn’t a formula or algorithm one can point to that explains what makes AlphaGo choose the next move it chooses. It just “thinks” on the state of the board and then produces a move.

In March of 2016 Lee Sedol, one of the world’s most acclaimed players of Go, went up against AlphaGo in a televised five-game set. If AlphaGo had merely beaten him this still would have been a watershed moment in AI history. It would be a demonstration that this digital brain has, somehow, encoded an understanding of the game. It has something like intuition in this domain. That’s already miraculous. It was a thing people had said was impossible with machines. Some of us were already expecting this might happen. We were excited for it. What very few of us were ready for was Move 37.

The Move 37 Moment

In their second game, on March 9th, AlphaGo placed a stone where no human would place one. This is the now-famous Move 37. Commentators were baffled. Those watching live and chatting online suspected that AlphaGo had glitched out and thrown an error. Lee Sedol stood up and walked away. He spent fifteen minutes agonizing over that move. No one had any idea what was going on. This wasn’t just a move that no human would make, this was a move that no human could imagine. It was either the most embarrassing flub possible, or proof that humans are no longer the pinnacle of Go-playing minds. And the only way to find out which was for Lee Sedol to throw down and play the hardest he’s ever played to test the machine’s intuition.

Move 37 turned out to be a superhuman move. AlphaGo won that game. Afterwards Lee said he felt “powerless” and AlphaGo was “an entity that cannot be defeated”. He was mostly correct - he went on to beat it in game four of their five-game match. That win crowns him as the only human who has ever defeated AlphaGo in official play.²

Before Move 37 everything in AI development still felt theoretical to me. Then I saw a bizarre act, the act of an alien mind, which inexplicably led to unavoidable defeat. This thing understood something we could not. It had an insight we don’t have the ability to see. I realized that we now share a planet with an alien intelligence. A new mind that thinks in different ways, and thinks things we cannot.

It was still extremely limited. Powerless outside the domain of Go. And yet a new mind nonetheless, and there was no going back. We didn’t share the planet with alien minds before, and we do now, and Move 37 on March 9th is the day that everyone saw it. You cannot go back into the same world you left from.³

The Day After

Ten years after the 9/11 attacks I began to understand a different aspect of my elders’ experience: lack of shared context. I didn’t have a period of my life before the moon landing, I didn’t remember the world as it was before then, nor did I witness the turning point. By the mid 2010s I was coming to know more and more adults who had no real memory of a pre-9/11 world. They were young enough when it happened that by the time their larger world-model was forming 9/11 was a historical fact. The only world they knew was the one that had already been altered. They didn’t feel the change.

Growing older is littered with such moments, where you have a sharp revelation and realize “Oh… that’s what they were feeling the whole time.” I understand why they didn’t really tell me, it’s impossible to really convey in words. It’s something one has to live through. Instead you watch the younger ones and wait, because you know eventually they’ll get it, and then they too will have that “Oh… that’s what they were feeling the whole time” feeling. Only time can bring that.

Even after such an Act Shift on Earth’s stage, time proceeds. Life continues, and a typical day before a history-cleaving event isn’t much different from a day after it on the individual level. Even if everything has changed for humanity, nothing has changed for the human. I still have to pay my rent and brush my teeth. And yet the color palette has shifted, the musical score has turned. You can tell the world is different. It is strange that the newer generations will only feel the world states that came after their emergence into the world. It is strange that I’ll never feel the world states before my own time. I find it unfair.

Ten years after Move 37 I now frequently run into adults who did not live in a world without alien minds in it. Adults who didn’t watch a brand-new brain made out of numbers play a stone in an unimaginable spot to carve a path to victory into the future. They are still living in the default world they were presented with. I hope they can soak in its flavor to the deepest extent possible. It’s hard to know what to appreciate when you don’t yet know how the flavors of history change. And I hope they can take some time, maybe a few minutes once a year, to think of how strange the world must have been in the before-times, when in all the world the only thinking beings were the humans born of flesh and blood.

1. I didn’t have those words for it then, the Sequences wouldn’t be started until six years later

2. His Move 78 in that game has a story of its own, but that’s a different story

3. The fourth ever episode of The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast was about Move 37 shortly after it happened. Sadly we were very new and still figuring things out, the audio quality is bad.