Bruce Lee Come Back! — Clash of Civilizations |

By Bill Lee

Forget for a while whether Donald Trump will be impeached or not, or whether life on Earth as we know it is doomed because Trump pulls the United States out of the Paris climate change agreement. Two sports-related events took place in China recently that could have equally serious ramifications: the thrashing by mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Xi Xiaodong, 37, of tai chi “thunder master” Wei Lei, 41, in Chengdu, and the razor-thin defeat of Chinese world Go champion, Ke Jie, 19, by Google’s AlphaGo, 3, in Wuzhen.

The fight between Xi and Wei was difficult to watch, especially if you blinked. Xi was immediately all over Wei, pummeling him ferociously and needing only ten seconds to end the bout. After the fight, the retired MMA fighter Xi was soon bombarded with criticism on China’s social media, excoriating him for disrespecting China’s martial arts traditions. Briefly shaken, Xi bounced back, claiming that Wei’s performances on TV claiming to use chi to create a force field that kept a pigeon on his hand were fake (the pigeon’s legs were taped to his palm, Xi alleged). Xi even challenged Jack Ma’s bodyguard Zou Shiming, a two-time Olympic boxing gold medalist and now world flyweight champ, to a fight. Millionaire Chen Sheng has also promised to put up $1.45 million as prize money for challengers to take on Xi and defeat him to preserve the dignity of Chinese martial arts. The Xi-Wei fight sent Netizens into heated debate on the legitimacy of tai chi as a martial art and the realism of MMA.

Although no blood was spilt — difficult to make a computer bleed — the AI Alphago algorithm program barely defeated Ke Jie, the world’s top Go player, in the first of three matches that will be no less violent mentally than the Xi-Wei fight — Go after all is a war game. Anyone who studies, for example, a chess game between a software program and a (human) grandmaster will be surprised at what seem to be the computer’s outrageous and completely out-of-the-box moves. An interesting aspect of these AI programs is that they challenge age-old assumptions about the right way to play. And they learn fast. Ke Jie was quoted as saying that last year when he played AlphaGo it was “humanlike” but this time it was like a “god.” Indeed, the creator of AlphaGo, Demis Hassabis, said that the program now learns faster by playing against itself; forget humans.

These two events seem to bode ill for human civilization. Although it may be like comparing apples and oranges, Xi Xiaodong’s devastation of Wei Lei seemed sure proof of the superiority of eclectic fusion. And there seems to be no doubt that the massive computing power and increasing algorithmic flexibility of AI will dominate human competitors. But, to wax lyrical, will anything replace the grace and philosophy of tai chi? Moreover, anyone who has seen an MMA fight cannot really think it is remotely human. And while humans will continue to lose Go and chess games to AI, they can fight back: just change the game to something like trying to persuade a diehard Trump supporter to change his mind. In the end, can any software creator ever make something as compelling and mad as Bobby Fischer?

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