Comment by CamperBob2

"Dumb beyond belief" doesn't perform at the gold-medal level at IMO.

And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?

I'd have dropped everything else I was doing and started learning about neural nets -- a technology that, for the previous couple of decades, I'd understood to be a pointless dead end.

As for Go, the defeat of Lee Sedol caught my attention in part because a friend and colleague, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, had spent a lot of time working on Go-playing AI as a hobby. He was strongly convinced that a computer program would never reach the top levels of play, at least not during our careers/lifetimes. The fact that he'd turned out to be wrong about that was unnerving, and it should have done more than "catch my attention," but it didn't.

Today, my graphics card can outdo me at any number of aspects of my profession, and that's more interesting (to me) than anything I've actually done.

...except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.

Like I said: it's a good time to start paying attention. Start taking notes, so to speak, like the models are doing now.