First of all, let me share that what Remi achieved with bots is incredible for Go players. When I was 16, the best bots out there were 6kyu, 5 ranks below the median rank for Go players.
Now, CrazyStone and Zen achieved 5d consistently on Go Servers, thats 5 ranks above the median. I have played Zen once, and I was utterly impressed by the quality of its play.
However, my game with the bot confirmed to me how bots WILL NOT beat professionals in a LONG LONG time. The bot excelled at tactical situations, and endgame. Maybe almost professional level. But the strategy is so weak, that the game turns into taking advantage in the first stage of the game, and then not losing it in the rest of it.
Until the computational power is strong enough to develop new openings, computers will always lag behind professionals in Go.
I don't agree with this. You can handle openings by using a pre-computed book.
If you think about it, this is actually how humans handle openings. There is an opening theory, to which huge amount of analysis(pre-computation) was done. Even professionals don't do impromptu opening analysis over the board.
On the other hand, in my opinion computer tactics are nowhere close to professional level. Not even close.
Openings can't be handled by a pre-computed book. What we humans call the opening can be 40 moves, and professional games often feature unique moves within the first 10-20 moves.
The situation with regard to the opening is quite different from chess.
Of the corner opening patterns alone (called joseki), there are 10000s of them, and it's very common to use novel ones. Many joseki, like the well known 4-4/3-3 invasion, can range from great plays to disasters depending on board position. And there are four corners.
The approach of trying to repeat the human process for pattern recognition is probably the main reason why bots were so weak until it was decided by a few computer scientists that Go should also be battled with brute force.
In one of the Zen vs Takemiya(?) or other professional games, the bot manages to kill a group by the professional with razor-sharp precision, including several tesujis. They excel at local tactical situations, and in terms of killing groups in a big board, they are excellent at poaching eyes.
Now, CrazyStone and Zen achieved 5d consistently on Go Servers, thats 5 ranks above the median. I have played Zen once, and I was utterly impressed by the quality of its play.
However, my game with the bot confirmed to me how bots WILL NOT beat professionals in a LONG LONG time. The bot excelled at tactical situations, and endgame. Maybe almost professional level. But the strategy is so weak, that the game turns into taking advantage in the first stage of the game, and then not losing it in the rest of it.
Until the computational power is strong enough to develop new openings, computers will always lag behind professionals in Go.