Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with an MIT research project became the Julia programming language
Julia is fantastic if you do numerical work and want to write out your inner loops explicitly without sacrificing too much performance, either for pedagogical reasons or because you want to fiddle with the algorithm. It is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code. So I expect many AI coders will feel comfortable just letting their agent handle it unsupervised (for better or worse).". This is a weirdly reductive take on frontend correctness. Just for the record, I'm a backend dev. So I don't have much stake in this game. This idea is, of course, not uncommon. "If the backend has to treat the frontend as adversarial anyway, and has all this cool stuff (constraints etc) for guaranteeing consistency of the system, then the frontend can just do whatever, right?" It plays into a lot of biases around typical frontend devs, typical backend devs, language stereotypes, etc. So it _sounds_ good. Let me tell you for a moment about one of the spookiest bugs I've seen. It was an app for sorting personal photos. You'd upload pics/vids off your phone, they appear in the UI, you click a folder for them to go into (or click delete to discard), etc. Simple app, right? Well, naturally, pics from even vaguely modern phones are regularly 5MB or more. Not really something you want to sling around while a user is browsing and their main activity is going to be a disaster. Users perceiving the products as largely interchangeable and quickly DDoS'ing the other providers when one is down. So much for the possibility of a tie, this works: For 2 players, the dealer rolls a standard d20 die: If the dealer has a tetrahedral (d4) die, they can use that instead for the 4-player problem. This is really neat. It would be interesting to have Claude Code export an engineering guide for doing similar ports, including descriptions of the tooling it built to do it. I've done some reversing from binary but never with results this good. Julia is fantastic if you do numerical work and want to write out your inner loops explicitly without sacrificing too much performance, either for pedagogical reasons or because you want to fiddle with the algorithm. It is a lot for KataGo. 20 seconds might sound like a handicap, but that's over 100,000 play out variations which is essentially infinite for modern KataGo models (anything over 10,000 is overkill). Shin played well in all games, but his strategy was to avoid complexity. KataGo reads out complex fighting like an absolute monster, so Shin was trying to play very very solid and very very calm so as to not give KataGo an in. The 2-stone handicap could be thought of as roughly 10-15 points of ‘buffer'. That's massive in professional games, and that's what Shin used to win. He played so overly solid that it sometimes cost a point or two, but it removed an opening for Katago to fight. He did this at the key opening and middle-game sections and never burnt through the full buffer of handicap points in the last two games. That's why those games look kinda ‘boring', it's because Shin wanted them to be that way. Also note that KataGo probably could have won if its 'variance' was tuned higher (basically it taking risks). Standard KataGo won't take risks, it just wins with brute force. For handicap games though you can tune its willingness to start fights higher to prevent people from just playing ultra solid (like Shin did). Shin did an absolutely amazing job and he deserves all the recognition. Katago routinely beats professionals giving them 3-4 stones of handicap, so the win by Shin highlights to me how strong he is, but also just how well he understands how the AI ‘thinks'. To a vapid any goalpost moving on such a critical issue as AGI. Can we all agree in advance what kind of Pelican would convince us it's actually AGI. For me it's refusing to make a programming language which is easy-to-learn like the creators of Julia proclaim. It may be somewhat easier to implement specific scientific functionality in the language but does that warrant the creation of yet another language? Scanning the language it doesn't strike me at all as "simple.". This article concludes with the following statement: It's a great article, but I think it is a bit of a trap for smart people with high agency where they assume "well, someone else will just go do