If your goal is to play as well as the best go bot and/or write a program that plays equally well from scratch, it seems like it’s probably impossible. A lot of the go bot’s ‘knowledge’ could well be things like “here’s a linear combination of 20000 features of the board predictive of winning”. There’s no reason for the coefficients of that linear combination to be compressible in any way; it’s just a mathematical fact that these particular coefficients happen to be the best at predicting winning. If you accepted “here the model is taking a giant linear combination of features” as “understanding” it might be more doable.
An even more pointed example: chess endgame tables. What does it mean to ‘fully understand’ it beyond understanding the algorithms which construct them, and is it a reasonable goal to attempt to play chess endgames as well as the tables?
If you have a “lazy” version of the goal, like “have a question-answerer that can tell you anything the model knows” or “produce a locally human-legible but potentially giant object capturing everything the model knows” then chess endgame tables are a reasonably straightforward case (“position X is a win for white”).
If your goal is to play as well as the best go bot and/or write a program that plays equally well from scratch, it seems like it’s probably impossible. A lot of the go bot’s ‘knowledge’ could well be things like “here’s a linear combination of 20000 features of the board predictive of winning”. There’s no reason for the coefficients of that linear combination to be compressible in any way; it’s just a mathematical fact that these particular coefficients happen to be the best at predicting winning. If you accepted “here the model is taking a giant linear combination of features” as “understanding” it might be more doable.
An even more pointed example: chess endgame tables. What does it mean to ‘fully understand’ it beyond understanding the algorithms which construct them, and is it a reasonable goal to attempt to play chess endgames as well as the tables?
If you have a “lazy” version of the goal, like “have a question-answerer that can tell you anything the model knows” or “produce a locally human-legible but potentially giant object capturing everything the model knows” then chess endgame tables are a reasonably straightforward case (“position X is a win for white”).