Novel-writing, like playing Go, is an art of assembly. The novelist compiles and assembles facts and artifacts. The novel has to be built on strong foundations to produce the proof of concept. Since it's not erecting an actual building, it has the luxury to bide time and cut corners for the stones to connect later on and to conquer more territory.
"Lee or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence" was an extended coda to <i>The MANIAC</i> by Benjamín Labatut. A standalone short novel, this section was assembled and adapted from various online materials: news, interviews, documentary movie, live streams of the five Go matches including the press conferences, comments by Go fans and veteran players on the YouTube live feeds, illustrated Go match commentaries by veteran players (e.g., Game 3 commentary), science articles, articles from peer-reviewed journals about AI mastering the game of Go (e.g., Nature 1, Nature 2, Science, Nature 3).
The word "delusions" in the section title was prominent in AlphaGo (2017), a riveting documentary directed by Greg Kohs. The documentary supplied the narrative structure of this section of the novel. In places, this last section of The MANIAC was a reshoot of the documentary. The human interest behind the five Go games in this section of the novel—the battle between a human grandmaster and a super-intelligent machine—tried to match or attain the suspense generated in the AlphaGo documentary, in Kawabata Yasunari's journalistic account (The Master of Go), and in the recent Netflix feature The Match (directed by Kim Hyung-joo).
Go was like breathing to him [Lee Sedol], a process that he could not stop: “I always think about Go. There is a Go board in my head. When I come up with new strategies, I place stones on the board in my head, even when I drink, watch dramas, or play billiards.”
The source of the quote was Lee's 2013 interview in Korea JoonAng Daily.
I always think about baduk. There is a baduk board in my head. When I come up with new strategies, I place stones on the board in my head even when I drink, watch dramas or play billiards.
That was practically verbatim, with the word "baduk" replaced by "Go". In the novel, an anecdote was told about Lee:
“One time, he and I drank together until two in the morning, but after that he invited me back to his house, falling down drunk, to go over a game he had just won, and replayed every stone, white and black, because even though he had won the match, he said there was one move—made by himself!—that he didn’t quite understand,” said Kim Ji-yeong. [emphases added]
It was basically the same story—with details added (the ones emphasized above)—from a 2016 article in the same Korean daily:
“One time, he and I drank together until 2 in the morning, but he went back to a game he had won and repeated every single move because he said there was one move he didn’t understand,” said Kim Ji-yeong, a Baduk TV anchor.
Lee lost to AlphaGo in the first three games. Game 4 proved decisive.
[Lee] took longer and longer before each move, cocking his head to one side, as if listening to a far-off rumble that only he could hear. By move 54, Lee’s clock had just 51 minutes left, while AlphaGo’s had 1 hour and 28 minutes of available time. The game inched forward, and just like before, it looked as if Lee was already on the verge of defeat; reporters began to crowd outside the playing room as the rumor that the fourth game would be the shortest of them all began to spread online. Nevertheless, Lee did not react, and played slowly, cautiously, avoiding direct confrontation, giving up almost the entire board to his opponent. “Is he not afraid to die?” Fan Hui wrote in his notes, despairing at Lee’s stubborn refusal to engage with the computer. Fan was so close to him physically that he could almost hear Lee’s thoughts and feel what he was waiting for, and soon he fell into the same trancelike state that had mesmerized the Korean grandmaster. By move 69, Lee was down to just 34 minutes, while his opponent still had over 1 hour and 18 minutes left. [emphasis added]
Labatut made modifications in his retelling of the match by compressing the events and paraphrasing the commentaries. Here's Fan Hui's published commentary on Game 4 (pdf):
As the game progressed, it seemed to everyone that Lee was once again on the verge of defeat.
White played the atari at 56, followed by the hane at 58. When Black ataried at 59, White had the option of linking up the group on the top. See diagram 7. Instead, however, Lee chose to pull out his center stone and extend at 62. With White's group now isolated and in grave peril, Lee's heart must have been overwhelmed with emotions. But perhaps he also sensed the long awaited moment at hand.
At move 63, Lee Sedol had 42 minutes, AlphaGo 1 hour and 22 minutes.
At this point, people suddenly began to congregate near the playing room. The rumor was spreading that the game was about to end, with AlphaGo victorious as expected. But Lee looked cool headed as ever as he played the turn at 68. Was he really not afraid of dying? [emphases added]
"People" in the commentary became "reporters" in the novel, giving more specificity and concreteness to the scene's fiction. "Was he really not afraid of dying?" became the more compact "Is he not afraid to die?"
The inspired move that turned things around was move 78. This was Labatut's version:
“The hand of God! That is a divine move!” shouted one of Lee Sedol’s historic rivals, Gu Li, jumping up from his seat in the Chinese webcast. Like a bolt of lightning, Lee’s 78th stone tore AlphaGo’s position apart, striking at the heart of the board with a wedge move unlike anything anyone had seen before. People went wild with excitement. [emphasis added]
This was cribbed from the commentary, with some variations.
At last, Lee Sedol launched his attack. Like an earthquake, the wedge at 78 tore apart the cracks in Black's fortress! None of us had anticipated this. When Gu Li saw White 78 from his broadcasting studio in China, he shouted: "The divine move!" All of Lee's painstaking preparations were finally about to bear fruit. [emphasis added]
Labatut's version captured the essence of what went on, replacing the "earthquake" with "bolt of lightning" and adding to the exclamation of the Chinese commentator Gu Li and other spectators.
“That would be so cool if it works,” said Chris Garlock, an American commentator, completely stunned. “That is such an exciting move. It’s going to change the whole game,” said his colleague at the DeepMind YouTube feed, Michael Redmond, agog at the potential that Lee Sedol had managed to find inside his opponent’s dominion, at a place where no other Go player in the world would have had the audacity to dive in.
In the actual commentary beginning at around 3:10:21, the sequence of comments made by Michael Redmond and Chris Garlock was reversed, and their comments were shortened and spliced from what were said in the YouTube footage. Here's the actual exchange in the video [emphases added].
Redmond: This is—. Oh, look at that move. That's an exciting move. [more comments while demonstrating scenarios and moves on the Go wall board] It's going to change the equation in this one. [more comments]
Garlock: Oh that's gonna change things.
Redmond: Now black cannot escape.
Garlock: That would be so cool if it works [more comments].
The cut made by the novelist actually followed the one in the documentary film. It's as if the novel was fictionally building on the documentary's editing of reality. Later in Game 4 of the novel:
When he saw what was happening, Demis Hassabis snuck away from the players’ room as quietly as he could and ran down the stairs, storming into the control room just in time to watch the head programmers huddled in front of a screen, where AlphaGo’s probability of winning had just fallen off a cliff. “Did anything strange happen before it started acting this way?” he [Demis] asked them, and when everyone replied that, just a few moments before Lee Sedol played his wedge move, everything looked normal—hell, better than normal, AlphaGo had been massacring Lee—they had nothing else to do but hunker down and try to contain the sinking feeling in their stomachs, as they realized that their worst fears were now coming true: AlphaGo had become delusional.
In the documentary (after around 1:07:48 timestamp), Demis made the remark, "It looks like it has fallen off a cliff". In reality, it was David Silver who asked the question made by Demis in the novel. David's question in the documentary was incomplete, in fact: “Did anything strange happen in the [pause]?
“What’s it doing there!” Hassabis screamed as he saw the next move that the computer was considering.
Demis made a similar remark but he hardly screamed. The scream was the novelist's touch, given the tense circumstances.
At one point Demis commented in the novel, “It knows it’s made a mistake, but it’s evaluating it the other way. I mean, look! Look! Lee is confused. He’s like, What’s it doing? That’s not an I’m scared look, that’s a What the fuck is it doing? look [profanity emphasized].”
His actual words in the documentary were not exactly like that (Labatut added a bit here and there) but essentially the same. However, Demis did not utter the fuck word in the documentary. The novelist did. The latter was heightening the frustration of the AI creator about the defeat of AI at the hands of a mortal in a game the machine had supposedly mastered.
In another live feed commentary, Kim Myungwan asked a question (at timestamp 1:59:36), "What's going on?"
The same scene was incorporated in the documentary (1:09:13) but was followed by the remarks Andrew (Myungwan's partner commentator) made earlier (1:58:00 in the Myungwan commentary). The documentary spliced together the conversations in the Myungwan commentary live feed, maximizing the power of editing granted this art form.
In the novel, Myungwan's question at 1:59:36 also appeared. It was followed by Andrew's responses spliced from Myungwan commentary at 1:47:12 and 1:48:12 and combined in the documentary at 1:07:35. The novel made a different response to the question but followed the liberties made by the documentary in re-sequencing the events.
At the blunder made by Alphago, the novel quoted a female host from a live broadcast of a South Korean TV station.
“Oh, that is ridiculous!” shouted the female host of one of seven South Korean TV stations that were broadcasting the match live. “Is it a mouse mis-click from Aja Huang? No, that’s the move. These are not human moves. It’s inexplicable. Those are mistakes, clear mistakes. For the first time in four matches, we have seen AlphaGo make mistakes. I think Lee Sedol found a chink in its armor. He found the weakness in the system,” she added as everyone watched the champion stare at the board, clearly as confused as everyone else. It took AlphaGo more than twenty moves to recover its sanity, but by then it had completely lost control of the game. [emphases added]
The quotes were attributed to the female host. In reality, she only uttered only the first exclamation (1:09:47 in the documentary). The rest of the statement followed (in the documentary) but these were not made by the host. They were spliced from statements of the other commentators: Myung-wan, Andrew, and the American commentators Garlock and Redmond. (I was not able to verify who made the last statement in the above quote.)
In Game 5, one commentator in the novel said, “Perhaps this is what 10, or 11,
dan play looks like? It [AlphaGo's move] looks weird, it looks ugly, it just doesn’t make
sense to us.” The statements were actually made by another person being interviewed in the documentary. Different speaker, slightly different speech in the documentary: “This is what 10 or maybe 11-dan play looks like. It looks weird, and we don’t quite understand it.”
In the novel, Lee's statements during the press conferences following the matches were spliced together from his actual statements during (a) the press conference, (b) the awards ceremony, and (c) his sit-down interviews for the documentary. The novelist sometimes imputed words not said or added flourishes to what were actually uttered. "Mind-blowing game", Demis would say in the final press conference. "This is the most mind-blowing experience of my life," the novel would say inside quotations. Garlock made a comment during the press conference that we'll be talking about these games for years to come. This will be integrated into Demis's speech during the press conference that the games "will be discussed for a very long time to come." Demis said in the novel during press conference, "For me it’s the culmination of a twenty-year dream", but he actually said this in an interview (not press conference), saying instead "For us" and not "For me". Labatut perhaps used the singular to hark back to the back story on Demis at the beginning of the novel's coda.
In the novel, AlphaGo was awarded an honorary 9 dan certificate after Lee left the stage. In the documentary, Lee was present during the awarding ceremony.
Labatut made liberal adjustments to what was said or what really occurred in the YouTube videos and other sources. He merged dialogues from various sources, supplied a precís or a paraphrase of statements, rearranged the chronology of scenes, shortened or expanded or rephrased and conflated the conversations made by various personalities, compressed time, and mis-attributed statements. To what ends? Were these deliberate infelicities meant to preserve the momentum of the story and the human interest? For continuity and dramatic tension? It's not real after all, this fiction. The drama is in the details.
These novel-writing tics were hallmarks of the works of Sebald and (to some extent) Kawabata. These tendencies to recreate events in a different plane of reality, similar to how the German novelist bent Pepys's diary entries to fit his own fiction and how the Japanese novelist tinkered with facts to add drama to his reportage. To bravely lie and flout facts: the stuff of true and truthful novels.
Because the truth is incapable of accomplishing social understanding, "Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language." We're going back to the ideas put forward by Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper, in The Book of Disquiet.
I’ve lied? No, I’ve understood. That lying, except for the childish and spontaneous kind that comes from wanting to be dreaming, is merely the recognition of other people’s real existence and of the need to conform that existence to our own, which cannot be conformed to theirs. Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language. Just as we make use of words, which are sounds articulated in an absurd way, to translate into real language the most private and subtle shifts of our thoughts and emotions (which words on their own would never be able to translate), so we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth – personal and incommunicable – could never accomplish.
This is the fourth and final blog post in a series about Labatut's novel about the role of science and scientists in developing WMD and AI technologies.