Interfacing AlphaGo: Embodied play, object agency, and algorithmic drama

Abstract

For decades, playing Go at a professional level has counted among those things that, in Dreyfus’s words, ‘computers still can’t do’. This changed dramatically in early March 2016, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, when AlphaGo, the most sophisticated Go program at the time, beat Lee Sedol, an internationally top-ranked Go professional, by four games to one. A documentary movie has captured and crafted the unfolding drama and, since AlphaGo’s momentous win, the drama has been retold in myriad variations. Yet the exhibition match as a technology demonstration—in short, the ‘ AlphaGo show’—has not received much scrutiny in STS, notwithstanding or precisely because of all the media frenzy, game commentary, and ‘AI’ expertise in its wake. This article therefore revisits the second game’s ‘move 37’, its surprise delivery by AlphaGo on stage, and the subsequent line of commentary by the attending experts, initiated by the news-receipt token ‘ooh’. Drawing upon a reflexive video analysis, the article explicates the Go move’s scenic intelligibility—its embodied delivery as part of the technology demonstration—as the contingent result of intricate ‘human/machine interfacing’. For mainstream media to report on AlphaGo’s ‘superhuman intelligence’, it both relied upon and effaced such interfacing work. In turn, the article describes and discusses how ‘object agency’ and ‘algorithmic drama’ both trade on skillfully embodied play as a pivotal interfacing practice, informing the exhibition match from within its livestream broadcast.